Glacial power 550watt power supply Review :: The Test

System test bed:

• MSI P35 Platinum Motherboard
• 4096mb DDR2 800
• 1 80GB SATA II HD WD
• (Drives added to increase load) 1x200GB SATA II HD 1x 320GB HD 1x500GB HD
• Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB
• 20XDVDRW
• Coolit Eliminator TEC/water cooler

Synthetic test done with Coolmax LCD PSU tester

Tests were performed under two conditions, synthetic and real world. Using the above tester we can see what base line performance the power supply can supply as well as spin up addition load through various hi load devices like the TEC based cooler and video card. Real world test are just that. We took an advanced configuration to stress the power supply to its limit. The thought being that if it can handle that it will be able to suit its intended purposes flawlessly. With that said let's move on.

Installation of this power supply went as smooth as any other non modular power supply. Out the box you get the power supply of course as well as a heavy duty power cord and 4 mounting screws. While the power cord is a standard inclusion in packaging (how else would you plug it in) the inclusion of installation screws is a subtle but nice touch. I can't count the number of time's I have upgraded a component of my computer only to spend an hour looking for the hardware needed to actually secure the device. The length of cables was ample enough to accommodate a standard full tower ATX chassis.

Once assemble the system powered just fine and ran stable under full load at stock settings. One of the nice features of this drive is that it is absolute silent, until put under heavy load and even then the power supply fan was barely audible over the other system fans.

The system specs we used pushed this power supply to its limit, while I would not recommend a 550watt PSU for a system with so many device and a high wattage TEC cooler, this power supply was able to sufficiently power the system at stock settings. This just goes to show that Glacial power has put some quality components into their power supply build. Synthetic test showed stable steady voltage across the rails with little to no voltage fluctuation under load. The power supply put out 380watts of power roughly equal to its 78% efficiency at 50% ROL.

Real world test showed that even with a large number of peripheral hardware the power supply was able to adequately power the system. However once we tried going into enthusiast mode, that is to say over clocking the system, we found the power supply just was not up to par with other units. With our TEC powered CoolIt Eliminator on low the system ran perfectly stable. However under higher temperature conditions when we the cooler need to be shifted into a higher mode of cooling I.E it needed more power. There just was not enough wattage provided by the 550BP to let the system run stable, numerous lock ups and crashed occurred do to power constraints.