It seems like everyone wants in on this action. The big push for high quality power supplies came long ago with Intel's now-defunct Pentium-D series processors, and the life of this movement was extended by the advent of SLI for NVIDIA's most power-hungry performance graphics cards. But with component efficiency constantly improving, questions about power supply quality have shifted from "how much power can it put out" to "how much power does it consume".

Corsair was actually a little late to the party, breaking into the power supply market around the same time as the Core 2 Duo, give or take a few months. But with memory competition driving prices down, it still made sense for the brand to come up with higher-margin products, and today's TX650W power unit promises the latest in efficient technology at the stability levels Corsair is known for.

Yet there is more to a power supply than just efficiency and stability at rated output, so we're going to torture test the TX650W at capacities beyond its rating. Will it survive? Can we reach the TX650W's stability limit? And does Corsair price its part competitively, making the TX650W a good value?