Arctic Cooling Fusion 550RF Power Supply Review

Testing Results

Just to recap how the testing will be done, I will be running 8 threads of Prime 95 on large fft’s to draw as much power through the processor and ram as possible. To bring the graphics cards to maximum draw I will use Hardware OC’s Crysis benchmark. The Crysis benchmark will be set to a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and very high settings.

Idle power consumption was taken 30 minutes after boot. As you can see above, the overclocked power consumption was only 4% more than at stock speeds. The peak output while overclocked was 112% of the rated output and 15% more than that of the power consumption at stock speeds. One thing that should be noted is these are the peak numbers during load testing. Below you can see what the approximate averages were during testing.

There is nothing scientific about the approximate averages. These are the Wattages that the system was floating around during testing. As you can see, the stock wattage was right at the rated continuous output of 500 watts. While the overclocked, output was 16% over the rated continuous and 5.5% over the peak output.

The 12 volt rail varied by only .165 volts during the tests. As the overall system power consumption rose, so did the Voltage on the 12 volt rail. Arctic Cooling has a +/- 5% rating on the 12 volt rails. That would allow the 12 volt rail to be anywhere between 11.4 volts and 12.6 volts. Over all fluctuation was only +.66% and -.71%. With only a total variance of 1.37% I would have to say that the 12 volt rail held up its end of the deal.

Unlike the 12 volt rails, the power on the 5 volt rail was lower while overclocked versus the stock settings. Though not by much, the average voltage was only different by .2%. The lowest the 5 volt rail reached was 4.998 volts. We have a total variance of 1.32% on the 5 volt rail. 1.32% is well within the +/- 5% allowed in the specifications.

The 3.3 volt rail stayed consistently just below 3.4 when it was checked.

Take a look at the next page for my final thoughts and conclusion.