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Date: May 14th, 2008
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Ultra
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH

A total of four SATA cables are included. Two of the cables have two connectors each, and the other two have three connectors each. Being able to choose between two or three connectors is nice because there have been many times I've only had two devices to plug in which left an unused connector dangling inside the case.

Molex connectors are plentiful. Two cables have two connectors plus a floppy connector. There's one cable that has three Molex connectors on it, one cable with two connectors, and one with just a single connector. The variety is nice to see!

 

PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING

The components that will be powered by the X3 include:

- Biostar TForce 550 SE Motherboard

- AMD X2 5000+ Black Edition CPU overclocked to 3.0 GHz

- Thermaltake Bigwater 760i LCS

- 2 x 1GB GSkill PC2-6400 RAM

- XFX Geforce 8600GT Video card

- 2 x 80GB WD800JD SATA hard drives

- NEC DVD-RW

- Thermaltake SwordM case

 

 

 

 

 

 

The absence of any permanently attached cables made for a quick and painless install. All connectors that are needed simply plug in to the unit and the ones that aren't needed won't be cluttering the case unnecessarily. I was very impressed by Ultra's FlexForce cabling design - the flexibility made it very easy to tuck away and hide any excess.

It takes a pretty beefy system to warrant an 800W power supply and while my system does just fine for the gaming I do, it is not top of the line. So for testing I will stress the CPU, memory, GPU, and hard drives simultaneously and record the load and idle voltages with Speedfan software.

I first recorded voltages while the system had been sitting idle at the Windows desktop for one hour, then ran continuous stress testing on the system for two hours and recorded voltages again. Here are the results:

 

Now even though the rails seemed lower at idle than they should be given the specs of this PSU, during load there wasn't too much fluctuation with the +3.3V and +5V rails. The +12V rail didn't even budge. Everything remained very stable no matter how much stress I put on the components. For $200 though, I was expecting some better numbers especially at idle.

As far as noise, I had to turn down the other fans in my case in order to hear it. Even then, it was barely audible. Less fan noise is always a good thing!