Seasonic S12 Power Supply - Performance
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The Fan
First things first, S12 means Silent 12cm fan. The fan in the S12 is very quiet but as power is consumed the fan can quickly become one of the louder components if you have an extremely silent system. The fan increasing speed as power is used may be rather annoying, although it’s considerably quiet, when you are used to quiet you will notice the fan increasing speed.
PC Test Bed
While testing the S12 I didn’t have the proper equipment to measure the overall wattage of the unit, but one of the easiest ways to test the stability of a unit is to run it at 100% usage to put the maximum load on all the components being powered and to watch the voltage of the rails to see if they fluctuate. During testing I had ran 3dmark benchmarking applications to get maximum load on processor, memory and graphics card.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice
Over-clocked to 2.698 GHz, 8x337 1.58v
Asus A8N SLI Motherboard
2x512MB Twinmos 224MHz 2.5 337 1T 3.0v
Abit X300SE graphics card
Western Digital Raptor Hard drive
8x NEC DVD+RW drive
3x120mm ADDA fans (80CFM)
Voltage Tests
This is the first time I have ever had a power supply run the same voltages Idle and Load. Even my system overclocked nearly 1000Mhz doesn’t affect the voltages of the S12.
The voltage readings from the S12 remain exactly the same idle and load, this is the first time I have ever happened to me. The only thing I could think of doing to pull more power from the S12 is to run a 105W peltier unit to use up 105w and 7 amps from the 12v line. I assume this would be very similar to running one of the highest powered graphics card in the system. The peltier reduced the voltage to 11.89v which fluctuated to 11.90v. A peltier junction is not very safe to run off the powersupply, although I am sure the S12 is more than powerful enough, stand alone power supplies are highly recommended while using a peltier.
Next: Conclusions >>
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