Cooler Master Real Power 450W PSU

Cases & PSU/Power Supplies by jmke @ 2004-07-26

Cooler Master making power supplies? We put their newest 450W creation through a series of tests on our fully equipped torture bench, does the Real Power survive? Read on to find out!

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Install & Testing

Well this is the page most of you have come for. In order to test the Real Power I put together the following configuration with parts I had lying around:

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  • CPU: P4 2.4Ghz “C”
  • Cooling: Swiftech MCX478-V + Papst 92mm
  • Motherboard: Asus P4C800
  • RAM: 1GB PC3200 Corsair PRO series
  • Video: Chaintech FX5900XT
  • Storage: 2x IDE Hard drives
  • Extra’s: Promise FastTrack SX150 with 32Mb SDRAM

    After hooking everything up I pushed the power button (or in this case, short circuit the correct pins on the motherboard with a screwdriver), lights out… and action!

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    The fan is actually a LED-fan it lights up quite strongly, no need for a CCFL in your case anymore. The small Wattage meter which fits into a floppy drive bay also lights up in a lovely blue color:

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    Using this nifty and fascinating device I started taking down values to see how high I could push the needle.

    With the system running at default speeds I got the following max. values:

    Boot: Booting of Windows XP
    Idle: Doing nothing but staring at a passive desktop
    Load: running 2 instances of K7 CPU burn and looping the game tests of 3DMark2001SE

    So off we go ->

  • boot: 130W
  • idle: 100W
  • load: 190W

    Not bad… but I want more, so I overclocked the CPU to 3ghz using 1.65v vcore

  • boot: 140W
  • idle: 100W
  • load: 210W

    In order to stress the PSU more I decided to add a few peripherals:

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    This was added:
  • 6x IDE drives (5x 7200rpm + 1x 5400rpm)
  • 3x CD-Rom/CDr
  • PCI ATA66 Adapter
  • 1x 80mm Fan (that tower of HDD’s runs very hot)
  • 2x ACRyan CCFL’s

    I pushed the CPU a bit further to 3125Mhz using 1.7v vcore and got these results:

  • boot: 200W
  • idle: 130W
  • load: 260W

    While this is some good fun to try and see how much hardware you can hook up one PC, in the end it will all be a “moo point” if the PSU can not “hold its rails” and give your system total stability.

    So using the latest configuration I started 3 different test scenarios:

    1) idle at the desktop in XP
    2) running 1 instance of CPUburn + defrag on all the hard drives simultaneously (thank you O&O Defrag)
    3) running 2 instances of CPUburn + Looping 3Dmark2001SE

    Here are the results:

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    All the rails are WELL within specification even with that much hardware hooked up to an overclocked P4 system, very impressive to say the least.

    Onto our conclusion on the next page ->
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