Testing
As I explained before, I do not have the specialized equipment for PSU testing (which costs thousands of dollars). So the best way I could do test the PSU is by using what we’ve got. My testing method involves comparing the voltage and power consumption reading during idle and at full load. I know it’s not the most accurate method technically, but I think this simple method should provide some ideas of the performance of the power supply in terms of stability and power consumption.
The main thing to watch out for, is the fluctuation on the +12V line. If the +12V line drops to below 11.5V during full load … then you’ve got trouble. The system may unstable and you might also get random reboots.
For our tests, we used our Project Core Arancio system which is comprised of an ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Killer 3.1 motherboard, along with an overclocked Intel Core i7-6800K at 4.0GHz, as well as 16GB of ADATA XPG Dazzle DDR4-2400 ram in dual channel mode.
We used AIDA64 and simultaneously ran both CPU and GPU stress test which produces 100% load. We then checked the voltage readings on AIDA64 and HWinfo64. A power meter was used to record the peak power consumption of the system.
| CPU | Intel Core i7-6800K |
| Overclocked | @ 4.0GHz |
| Cooling | Thermaltake Pacific W4 RGB CPU Waterblock |
| Motherboard | ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Killer 3.1 |
| Ram | 16GB ADATA XPG Dazzle DDR4-2400 |
| HDD | Crucial MX300 SSD – 750GB |
| PSU | Thermaltake Smart Pro RGB 850W |
| VGA card | Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 AMP Extreme (8GB GDDR5) |
| GPU Water Block | Bitspower RGB GPU Water Block for Zotac GeForce GTX 1070/1080 |
| Watercooling |
All Thermaltake watercooling parts … including Radiators, Pumps, fittings and Riing fans |
| Nvidia Drivers | Version 375.90 WHQL |
| OS | Windows 10 |
Additional components drawing power
- 3 x LED strips
- 2 x Thermaltake Riing fans
- 1 x Thermaltake D5 pump
- 2 x USB Hard drives
