Introduction

How many reviews of power supplies have you read? I bet you that in the majority of those the reviewer will mention something along the line of this:

Power supplies are generally not thought of as the most interesting PC components, but they can often be the most vital, especially for system stability when you're pushing your hardware to its limits

While we assume that this statement is true in most cases, how accurate is it? To find out we went out and bought two cheap no-name power supply units and put them through a series of in-depth load tests.

The No-Name Products

We visited two local PC stores with a small amount of cash stuffed in our wallet with the aim of walking out of them with a working, brand new PSU.

The first shop we visited was Forcom where we bought the cheapest ATX unit available: a no-name 450W ATX PSU with 120mm fan and P4/AMD connector, it even features SATA power connectors!



This is what we got for €23, a Stability Power unit, Forcom sells it as a 450W unit, while a sticker on the PSU labels it as 500W.

Next we sought out a higher rated model at Alternate, a €49 Sweex Low Noise 650W PSU.



While not exactly a no-name brand, this Sweex unit was the cheapest 650W unit we could find, you can find a bit more info here about this PSU.

Time to start our tests to see how if these units can perform as advertised ->