With the introduction of power hungry video setups like Crossfire and SLI, having a PSU that does what it says on the tin is more important than ever. A number of magazines and websites have conducted scientific tests of power supplies in recent months, measuring their peak loads and cut-off points, as well as their efficiency. Whilst this is quite useful data, I don’t believe it is an accurate representation of how a real PC works.

Instead, we have borrowed one of the most demanding PC configurations known to man to test our PSUs in a real-world environment – the Chillblast Fusion X4 workstation. Into this beast we have quad-opteron 275 cores, a Tyan K8WE motherboard, and 16GB of memory. After this the spec gets really interesting, as we also have dual Quadro FX 4500 (the workstation variant of the 7800 GTX 512MB) video cards and a RAID 5 array of ten (yes, TEN) 10,000 rpm drives. According to my handy PSU calculator, at peak load this machine actually requires somewhere in the region of 550W, so any of today’s competitors not delivering their advertised output are going to be in trouble.