Testing:
To test the idle and load voltages of the
OCZ Technology 600W EvoStream Modular SLI Power Supply, I installed it in a system with the following equipment:
» AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor @ 2750MHz
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe @ 250x11
» 2x eVGA 7900GTO PCIe card SLI
» Thermaltake Eureka Super Tower case
» 2GB (2x1024) OCZ Special Ops Elite DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) @ 2.1V
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA-II hard drive in RAID 0
» 2x 160GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-n-1 Media Card reader
» Fans: 10x120mm LED, 6x92mm LED, 10x80mm LED, 4x80mm Non-LED
» Cooler Master CoolDrive IV
» 1x Hauppauge 350 PVR
The idle condition was established by powering the system at default speeds and voltages with no applications running for a period of at least 30 minutes. The load condition was established by running Folding@Home and SiSoft Sandra 2007's Burn-in Wizard for a period of at least 60 minutes. In addition to these stressful applications running, the loaded system was overclocked and overvolted (as detailed in the list above) to add more demand to the power supply. Voltage readings were taken using a Craftsman Auto-Ranging Multimeter (Model 82139), and checked with the Asus Probe II motherboard monitoring tool.
Here you can see both the idle and the load voltages for the 600W EvoStream. As you can see, during the idle conditions, the 5V rail was putting out slightly less than 5V, and the 3.3V and 12V rails were putting out slightly more than the official rating. All rails were well within the +/- 5% tolerance (approximately 1.50% - 2.75%). Under the load conditions, each of the rails dropped slightly, and had a 0.5% to 2.0% fluctuation going from idle to load conditions.
The next chart compares the load voltage readings of the 600W EvoStream against three other power supplies, the Cooler Master iGreen 500W, the Ultra Products 600W VS, and the OCZ GameXStream 700W. Looking at the load voltage readings of each of the power supplies you can see the EvoStream matches them pretty closely. Under load conditions, the EvoStream had the weakest 5V rail, while the 3.3V was near the top, and the 12V was near the bottom of the pack.
