PSU Fan Noise Under Load
For this test, we are loading the PSU to a given percentage of its rated power capacity and recording the PSU’s integrated fan’s noise. In simplistic terms, and somewhat incorrectly, the louder the fan profile, the lower the perceived quality of the internal design is at keeping the PSU running within in optimal temperature range. This could be due to cost-cutting on the fan, the internal heatsinks’ dimensions, material of said heat sinks (e.g., tofu dregs vs. actual aluminum)… or just the overall efficiency of the PSU’s components at converting AC to DC (and/or DC to DC). Regardless of the reason, home consumers, unlike enterprise consumers, want as quiet a PSU as possible and consider noise a ‘bad thing’ even if it comes at the expense of running their PSU above actual optimal operating temperatures.
Each test will be 20 minutes in length, with the average of four tests per step displayed below.
PSU Voltage Ripple Under Load
For this test we are loading the PSU to a given percentage of its rated power capacity and checking to see how much “ripple” there is on each of the main lines. In layman’s terms, ripple is the amount of variance between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ peaks on a given lines voltage output. For example, if the ripple is 20 millivolts, that typically means that instead of a perfect 12.00,0 it probably will vary from 11.990 to 12.010. While technically the standard for acceptable ripple is 120mv on the 12 and 50mv on the others… we feel that anything over 40mv on any of the lines is unacceptable by modern standards, and 30mv or less is what we are most comfortable with (with lower always being better than higher than this personal minimum acceptable standard).
Each test will be 20 minutes in length, with the average of four tests per step being displayed below.
