Installation and Operation:
To test the power provided by the
Xclio Stable Power 500W Power Supply, it was installed in a system with the following components:
» AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor
» Ultra Products ChillTec thermo electric CPU cooler
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard
» 2GB (2x1024MB) OCZ DDR2 8500 SLI RAM
» eVGA 7900GTO card
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3Gbps hard drives in RAID 0
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-in-1 Media Card reader
» Cooler Master CoolDrive IV
» Fans: 2x120mm LED
The image below shows the power supply once it has been installed, and it is clear that unwrapped cables can make a mess of the interior of a case. All of the leads are in use except for one PCI-Express cable, since SLI graphics was not set up for this review. I found the SATA cable to be a difficult to use for my specific installation. I have a removable 3-bay SATA hard drive chassis which I use for my RAID 0 drives and for OS testing. This chassis uses one SATA and two 4-pin Molex connectors, and I also use a single SATA drive in the hard drive trays found at the bottom section of the case. The single SATA cable barely reached the two locations.
For testing, the power supply was analyzed at both idle and load conditions and compared to other units with similar power ratings.
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'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 to add more demand to the CPU.
Voltages were read from the various rails using a Craftsman Auto-Ranging Multimeter (Model 82139) by tapping into the correct wires on the motherboard connector.
