SysOpt > Features > Cases & Power > Power and Features Beyond Your Needs? Ultra X3 800W Power Supply Review

Power and Features Beyond Your Needs? Ultra X3 800W Power Supply Review- Page 3/4
November 29, 2007
By Thomas Soderstrom

While the latest Ultra X3 offers 800W of power, is there such a thing as a PC that really draws that much? Probably, but few people would use such a monster for gaming. Indeed, we've been using two loaded platforms with a custom splitter cable to reach similarly high loads.

Thanks to the inclusion of a faster, overclocked, dual-core processor, our AMD platform ramps up the wattage requirement compared to previous configurations. We used a core voltage of 1.45V and increased its multiplier to 15x to reach an easy overclock of 3.0GHz, with a peak estimated total system load of 362W.

Of course, our old Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 is as wasteful as ever, and a combination of overclocking to 4.33GHz at 1.60V plus TEC cooling keeps pushing this platform to an estimated 538W peak load.

Though the combined peak load of 900W might not be reached, we would certainly hope that running these systems in a gaming environment would help us get close. An older program that relies heavily on CPU and memory performance as well as graphics prowess, we used 3D Mark 2001SE in looping mode to apply stress.

After burning in the power supply for several hours of continuous use, we were ready to begin taking a few readings. Hot-plugging four additional drives with an approximate combined 50W startup power requirement aided in accessing the Ultra X3 800W power supply's ability to deal with load changes, and dropping both systems out of the benchmarks simultaneously allowed us to look for any voltage spikes. Now for the results.

While we often hope to overload a power supply simply to see how well its over-current protection works, we didn't even come close to breaking the Ultra X3 800W even while powering two systems in a high stress environment. Not only were the results phenomenal, but they cause us to question why anyone would even consider a "higher-capacity" model.

We never heard the fan on the Ultra X3 800W over the noise of other system fans, but the other fans were rather noisy. Still, it is nice to know that the X3 800W didn't add noticeably to the ambient noise level created by all the other cooling fans.

Tools:

Add www.sysopt.com to your favorites Add www.sysopt.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x Receive news via our XML/RSS feed