| AC Ryan RyanPower2 550W Modular PSU - Page 3 of 3 |
Testing:
I set out to create a system that would tax even the biggest power supplies. I dug through the parts cabinet and came up with this; I call it the kitchen sink system!
• ECS 848P-A Motherboard
• Intel P4 2.4A/533 Processor
• Thermaltake PIPE101 Heatsink
• 2 x 256 Corsair XMS (BH5) Ram
• DVD Optical drive
• Radeon AIW graphics card
• Silicon Image 4 channel PCI IDE RAID Card
• 4x 80 gig hard drives in RAID 0
• Western Digital 36 gig Raptor for Windows XP
• 5 LED fans
• 4x 12” Sunbeam CCFL’s on two inverters
• Sunbeam Chameleon 4 channel light controller with 4 laser LED’s
• Sunbeam Lightbus 4 channel programmable light controller for fans and CCFL’s
• A couple extra network cards I had lying around…
Below, a picture of everything mounted up and running…(there are so many lights in this case a flash was not needed!)
The first thing I wanted to try was running everything as hard as possible. I started out by transferring 6 gigabytes of files across the network to the 4 RAIDed drives, copying a DVD to the Raptor hard drive, and simultaneously running 3Dmark 2001 to load the processor and graphics card down. The whole time this was going on, all controllers had all the lights and fans running full blast. To add to all this, I plugged my Corsair Voyager flash drive and a USB 2.0 portable laptop drive into the front USB ports and had a file transfer going between the two of them. I was expecting things to get a little unstable at the best and to crash miserably at the worst. Needless to say, everything was running quite slow, but as the High/Low event monitor in Mother Board Monitor shows below, the +3.3V and the +5V rails did not dip or rise a bit! As a side note, for the life of me I cannot get Mother Board Monitor to report either of the 12V rails. I monitored the +12V rail with the min/max functions on a Fluke multimeter and found no significant fluctuations there either.
To make sure Motherboard Monitor was reporting voltages correctly, I used the same Fluke multimeter to check voltages. The results are shown below. Again, extremely small fluctuations between unloaded and loaded conditions. Not only that, but the voltages are very close to where they are supposed to be.
The graph below shows how the AC Ryan Ryanpower2 compares to the Enermax EG701AX-VE when powering the “kitchen sink”.
I also used a Seasonic Power Angel to record a few other measurements.
A few words about watts, volt-amps, and power factor:
In AC systems, watts do not normally equal volts x amps (as they do in DC systems) because the voltage and current can be out-of-phase with one another. When the voltage is at a maximum, the current in the circuit can be somewhere in the middle. So the peak values of voltage and amperage may occur at different times. Power requires both voltage and current at the same time. Because of this, the product of volts and amps in an AC circuit is often higher than the actual power in the circuit. The ratio between these two values is called the power factor of the system or PF.
Fully loaded as above and with the Power Angel measuring power supply input voltage, I took some measurements. The power supply was drawing 1.72 Amps, 204 Watts, and 206 VA. This all adds up to a power factor of .99 or 99% efficient. For comparison, I also tested a non Active PFC supply and it showed a loaded efficiency of 66%. This means it took 257VA or 2.16 Amps to power a 193-watt load. Having an ActivePFC will definitely lower your power bills.
Conclusion:
This is my first modular designed power supply and I will now have a hard time going back to a power supply that has cables permanently attached. The AC Ryan Ryanpower2 550 Watt power supply is an extremely well built, tightly regulated, and nice looking device with plenty of futureproof features. I believe the issues I had with the shipping damage and the European power cord are isolated issues and should not happen to anyone else. Some things about the cabling had me a bit confused, the third wire being included in the fan cable, and the dual Molex connectors in the PCI-Express adapter was also strange. Although it doesn’t hurt performance, the hand made look of the modular modification was also out of character. I must say, the steady voltages the Ryanpower2 showed, even with the kitchen sink thrown at it pleasantly surprised me.
I had only a small bit of luck when searching for prices or places to purchase this power supply. AC Ryan lists performance-pcs.com as the only source for the Ryanpower2 and it retails there for $129.95.
I give the AC Ryan Ryanpower2 550 Watt Modular power supply 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Final Rating (4.5 out of 5 stars):  
Pros:
• Modular Design
• Lots of modding options
• Fit and finish
• Extremely tight regulation
Cons:
• Third wire in fan cable
• Short/ backward hard drive cable
• Packing box and power supply damage (may be isolated incident)
• Requires an adapter for PCI-Express compatibility
Special thanks to AC Ryan for providing the Ryanpower2 550W Power Supply to Bigbruin.com for review!
Please drop by the Bigbruin.com Forum and feel free to discuss this review.
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