Let's start this comparison off right, with a view inside both of the power supplies. Don't mind the sad looking tatters on the left of the normal X-Finity, as it's the remains of yon warrantee tag.
As we pointed out before, the stealthy addition to the family seems to bring to the table the American Ideal - bigger is always better. With a significantly longer casing, marginally bigger fan, and more circuitry, it's a wonder this thing doesn't weight a ton and boil - both issues that are handled by its all aluminum casing of course. With those points made and put aside, let the conventional test methods be described, then enacted!
In order to test the performance of the supply, we've calibrated Motherboard Monitor 5 using the sensor files for the DFI Motherboards, (Available Here), and then further calibrated these sensors to agree with a Digital Multimeter at idle. We then fire up OCCT (Available Here) and let it run its course, under three different scenarios. The first of which involves just letting the program run on it's own to simulate a day to day load on the system. The second level of testing sees us defragmenting a drive that hasn't been lucky enough to have such done to it in some months now, while we rip a DVD to yet another of the system's 3 drives. This is intended to demonstrate the kind of load that most heavy multimedia users would demonstrate. The third level of loading is intended to see how well the power supply copes with the insatiable thirst for power provided by our SLI'd 6800GTs. During this test, 3D Mark 2005 is looped 5 times at the standard quality level while OCCT runs. To those of you wondering why we use OCCT, it is for the simple reason that it creates graphs of every voltage change seen on the 12V, 3.3V and 5V lines during a test. With the methodology to our madness in mind, let's proceed on to showing off the test setup, then finding out just how the X2 holds up when the pressure hits hard.
Test Bed
- 3000+ Clocked to 2.52GHz (280*9, 1.61V, Drawing 124W)
- DFI SLI-D With all power connections made (20W)
- 2x NVIDIA 6800GTs (Drawing 100W each)
- 2x512MB OCZ GX Memory (Clocked to 252MHz @ 2-2-2-0, 3.33V, Drawing 80W)
- Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe (Drawing Mere Standby Power)
- 2x80GB Maxtor SATA Drives, 1x250GB WD PATA Drive (60W Draw on 12V/5V)
- LG Combo DVD Drive (20W Draw)
- Assorted cooling care of a shed worth of fans, 10W
- Total Wattage Needs Estimate: 574W!
It's going to be quite tough for both of these units to stomach our test bed - after all, the wattage requirements within quite well exceed their ratings.
