The Free After Rebate Ultra 500W Power Supply

Testing The Power Supply

To test out the free Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply, I figured why not try it out on a mainstream dual-core system with a few different video cards. I quickly put together a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ based system using the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. Also on the system was 2GB Corsair PC2-8888 Memory, a Western Digital 250GB hard drive, Zalman CNPS9700 NT heatsink and a Sony DVD player.

We then took load and idle results using the XFX GeForce 7900GS, XFX GeForce 7900GTX and XGX GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards to see if the Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply can handle the load. To get the load results we played an audio CD and ran 3dMark06. The CPU was at 100% load and the hard drive and optical drives were both in use. The video card and processor cooling fans were also manually set to high as you can hear in the video clips.

XFX GeForce 7900 GS:

First up to bat is the XFX GeForce 7900 GS video card. To run this card it is suggested that you have a 350W power supply with 12V rating of 20A or more.

	3.3	5V	12V
IDLE	3.415	5.16	12.07
LOAD	3.403	5.17	12.00

Results: The Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply ran the system just fine with the XFX GeForce 7900GS! None of the voltage rails dropped below where they should be and the 3.3V and 5V rails looked to be strong. As the 35 second video clip shows the 12V rail does bounce around a bit while playing the CD and running 3DMark06, but it remained between 12.00V and 12.04V during the load testing. The peak power consumption of the entire platform was observed to be 196W.

XFX GeForce 7900 GTX:

Next up is the XFX GeForce 7900 GTX video card. To run this card it is suggested that you have a 450W power supply with +12V current rating of 22A or more.

	3.3	5V	12V
IDLE	3.410	5.16	12.04
LOAD	3.394	5.18	11.95

Results: Believe it or not the Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply ran the system just fine with bigger and more power hungry XFX GeForce 7900 GTX! The +12V rail dropped below where they should for the first time, but was by no means beyond tolerances. The 3.3V and 5V rails continued to look good. The 35 second video clip shows the +12V rail does bounce around a bit while playing the CD and running 3DMark06, but it remained between 12.00V and 12.04V during the load testing. The peak power consumption of the entire platform was observed to be 245W.

With the +12V rail starting to show signs of weakness, can it handle the XGX GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card?