X-bit labs

Started by: LeadSled | Date 01/18/08

Comments: 15 | Last Comment:  02/11/08

[1-9]

1. These PSU are great for people running thermal electric cooling for their CPU's. The higher rated peltier units of 226W cooling @ 25A(300W).
Myself I run 4X74Raptors, OC 4800+ X2@3Ghz@1.6v,ASUS A8R32-MVP , 8800GTX , waterpump, 3 fans , 4X1G PC4000, 2 sound cards X-Fi+ Onboard , 2XOptical drives 3 USB devices and I need the 850W PSU I have now and when I add the 226W peltier cooler I will be very close to the 1000W if not a little more. So I could see how a high end gaming machine could easly use a 1000W PSU

Your setup wold run perfectly with a decent 500 W PSU. RAM, fans, sound card, USB devices they all consume only couple of watts per device, hard disks some 10 W per disk. Have you ever checked the specs of your water pump? Only the CPU and 8800 GTX take up 100+ W each. If you had double SLI system (i.e. four video cards) you would need 850W.

With Peltier cooling, 850 W PSU might also be needed but what's the point of using twice the power taken up by the CPU just to squeeze out some 10% more in performance? You could buy an Intel mobo and Core 2 Duo or Quad CPU and achieve bigger improvement in performance.

No one really needs these 1 kW monsters, but the marketing people are very happy that there are lots of people who believe in all the bulls**t they claim.

also, you should run your psu at 70~75% load, or else the psu gets very power inefficient. You should go for the 80+ efficiency certification...
The money that you save on electricity is ginourmous...

2. lol, don't you mean 1 kilowatt? kilo = thousand.

we reviewed 10 PSUs each at least 1kW, so 1kW times 10 = 10 kW :)

3. And why would ANYONE need 10 kilowats of power? You forgot to mention that in your article. These thing are NOT CPU's or GPU's so "more" is not better.

4. Where the hell is your testing methodology?

At least provide a link to something you claim exists.

No, I don't like looking for non-existent crap I'm supposed to refer to, to have an article make sense.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/psu-methodology.html

Sorry, we forgot to update the link. It has been added to the article.
The latest testing methodology is discussed in our article called X-bit Labs Presents: Power Supply Unit Testing Methodology In-Depth (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/psu-methodology2.html)

5. Since when is Silver Power a division of Silverstone ??

Silverstone makes Quality powersupplies & not the crap silverpower is sellin...
get aleast your brandnames right..

Sorry, it's just a misprint. SilverPower is SilverPower and not Silverstone.

6. Come on guys - PC Power & Cooling (now part of OCZ) is a leader in the space. At least read Tom's reviews to get the top players!

7. I love this part:
"Sixteen CPU cores (4 by 4), five graphics cards, 24 hard disk drives. I guess the marketing folk from Enermax have gone too excited about this PSU as to imagine PC systems that just do not exist. That’s what I wrote about in my previous report concerning 1000W power supplies – such PSUs are not yet really necessary even for top-end gaming configurations that require much less power.

Anyway, 1000W PSUs do exist and my job is to test them using an artificial 1000W load."
LOL
Good work on the article. :)

8. Why didnt you include any testing of PC Power & Cooling in this??

9. Too bad nothing was mentioned about the quality of the capacitors. Antec and others are plagued with chronic failure from continued use of crappy capacitors such as Fuhjyyu.

see: www.badcaps.net

I expect high end power supplies to have generous ventilation and be completely free of cheap caps. Rubycons only cost a few pennies more at these volume levels, yet Antec and the others refuse to improve their product quality. The best design in the world isn't worth anything when it craps out due to cheap components.

[1-9]