Interesting example of the 'how much power do I need' debate

davidstone28 · Post by **davidstone28** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 3:36 pm

Courtesy of Tech Report:-

Sytem specs here:-

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/psus/index.x?pg=11

and power draw here:-

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/psus/index.x?pg=15

That line about 300W PSUs being fine for most sytems seems pretty accurate.

Although they've made an erroneous comment about the SilverStone by saying it has passive PFC when in fact, it's APFC.

msm_zgok · Post by **msm_zgok** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 4:50 pm

Nice article, but was that one page dedicated to weight really necessary?

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Wed Oct 06, 2004 5:38 pm

I read the article and I had only one question. How do people get such nice equipment with such poor testing standards? Alright, to their credit, I was impressed with the line noise test except for one thing: What does that tell us?

They don't even specify the TOOL they used to measure the wattage. (At the end, comments, the author/tester mentions that it's a True RMS meter, but they still don't say what they used).

The noise measurements just clearly show that they have a really loud base system. Barring coil noise, shouldn't the passive PSU be the baseline which defines how loud the others are?

halcyon · Post by **halcyon** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 1:51 am

The more attention you get and the more positive it is, the better.

So it's better to send equipment to sources, who don't know how to review/test them or just don't want to do it properly, but who still have a large enough audience.

Now, I'm not saying Tech Report is bad (they've done a lot of nice tests).

However from the point of view of the marketing department, it's always safer to send a product to a wannabe tester, who will give it a good review just because he/she got a freebie

ascii · Post by **ascii** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 3:17 am

I'm wondering about the accuracy on the dB measurements. Tiny fluctuiations in room temperature can easily be heard on many computers I've used over the years. Add to this that some fans have a varying noise level, dB-meters are inaccurate, the meters placement, 1" from the case makes it very sensitive to tiny differences in airflow, etc, etc.

The noise difference between different PSUs under load is just a few dB, I would say those differences could easily come entirely from error factors such as described above.