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| Performance |
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Now let’s take a multimeter those rails and see how they perform.
Here we see the voltage of the 3.3, 5 and 12 volt rails at idle. I define
idle to be my system at rest no less than 5 minutes after the OS loads.
All unnecessary peripherals such as secondary LCD screens and UV lights
are turned off and all optical drives have spun down to a stop. Here we
can see the 3.3v line sitting at a comfortable 3.335; the 5v rail resting
at 5.087 and the 12v rail at a rock solid 12.00. I couldn’t expect
any more from a power supply at Idle than these three readings. The 3.3
is less than one quarter percent out of line, the 5v rail is only one and
three quarter percent out of skew and the 12v rail hasn’t wavered
at all. The come well within Antecs self set standard of ±3%.
|
|
With such impressive results at idle; let’s see what the TruePower
gives us at load. I define load to be my system booting its OS, starting
Motherboard monitor 5.2.2, immediately starting 3 consecutive cycles of
3Dmark 2001SE while at the same time burning an ISO of Linux Mandrake at
16x and transferring a 1GB file through its 100baseTX network to its slave
drive courtesy of a nicely built little batch file. As if that wasn’t
enough, the onboard LCD screen and both UV Cold Cathodes are also burning
bright. With that said, let’s take a look at the results. 5.093 on
the 5v rail is just less than one quarter percent over its idle voltage.
The 12v rail also just shows a one quarter percent flutter to 12.03 at load.
That is absolutely incredible! When Antec displays the TruePower logo on
one of its products, it really does mean true, absolute, undisputable power
stability.
|
Some may ask why I
chose to use a Fluke Digital Multimeter instead of the familiar Motherboard
Monitor that so many other reviews swear by. I believe the results below
might give you some clue. Although MBM is an extremely well built tool,
it’s still at the mercy of the motherboards voltage sensors. These
sensors are known to be inherently “blonde” and don’t
always return the true values. Just to appease those non believers I have
included the results of the MBM tests. Again, these can be horribly misleading
and vary widely from board to board.
|
| IDLE |
| Sensor |
Low |
High
|
Average |
| +3.3 |
3.39 |
3.39 |
3.39 |
| +5.00 |
5.05 |
5.08 |
5.08 |
| +12.00 |
11.89 |
11.89 |
11.89 |
| LOAD |
| Sensor |
Low |
High |
Average |
| +3.3 |
3.37 |
3.39 |
3.39 |
| +5.00 |
5.05 |
5.08 |
5.07 |
| +12.00 |
11.89 |
11.89 |
11.89 |
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| CONTENTS |
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