Epower Tiger 1200 Watt - Testing
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Testing a 1200 watt power supply is a very daunting job. Creating a 1200 watt computer isn't an easy job. I had to venture away from my computer and borrow a few parts from my buddy while he was at work to help load up my computer for maximum power consumption. I borrowed his two 7800 GTXes and his ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium. This will allow me to test a lot more draw from the power supply as compared to my Abit IP35-E and 8600 GT. This still won't totally max out the PSU, but it will give a good example of what a really good PC will do to the power supply. The whole test bed looks as follows:
I pretty much plugged in everything I owned and pulled stuff from some other cases I have to help power this computer. For the idle test setting, I booted into Windows and left it alone at the desktop for an hour. For the stress test I loaded up the system with everything I could. I ran 3DMark 06 to put the strain from the video cards. To push the CPU to max I ran Orthos, the blend test for maximum usage of the CPU and the memory. To stress as much as possible I constantly copied DVDs from the optical DVD RW drives to the hard drives. I did this for two hours before I took the at load readings.
You might not need 1200 watts right now, but the future is leading toward it. SLI and Crossfire both require lots of power. If you have either of these you're going to need extra power. If two cards weren't bad enough, both nVidia and ATI are coming out with three-card configurations. Remember that a typical 8800 GTX can easily take 300 watts of power under load. Now multiply that by three and you're looking at 900 watts out of the 1000 watts of 12v that this PSU has. This PSU will be able to handle that and provide enough headroom to be comfortable in case it draws more than you expect.
The results are amazing. This power supply kept the test rig in check and hardly budged at all. Even under extreme stress it had no problems keeping up. I always prefer to have the rails a little higher rather than a little lower than the respected rating. Granted, the acceptable spec is a wide range, but I still don't like to see levels below the zero level.
What was great about this PSU was that the rails hardly budged, which leads me to believe that the more stress you put on the PSU, it will still be good to go. The rails were also very sturdy and didn't fluctuate during the testing. As overclockers, we want to have solid rails that we know are going to be at spec and not move, because a little dip in power could bring the whole computer crashing down. The ePower Tiger 1200 watt PSU delivers maximum power and stable power, period.
Just as a note, I'd like to add that you should not believe what the software monitoring program says, as they tend to be off. My 12v rail was reading a whopping 6.85v at idle. At that rate I would be looking at a blank screen, and giving this a horrible review.
Next: Conclusion >>
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