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| Antec TruePower 550watt PSU |
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| Written by Alexandru Spataru | |
| Monday, 18 June 2007 | |
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Power supply units have been neglected by most PC users for a very long time simply because these users did not understand the importance of a high quality PSU. Today, when the usual computer has lots of components in it, the PSU can make a very big difference. For instance, consider a usual mid-range PC:
Usually, when the PSU delivers less power than needed, either the system will crash, reset itself, or some components will cease to function properly. For instance, I worked with a computer which had two HDD's and a CDRW, and it worked just fine. That until a new HDD was added, then either the CDRW or one of the HDDs was not working at all, because the PSU didn't have enough power to sustain all four IDE devices. Now that's very frustrating, but even more frustrating is when the system simply resets when the PSU's maximum potential is reached. Imagine being in the middle of a battle online and your computers reboots all of the sudden. That is simply irritating. And it gets even worse. One of my friends had a PSU blow up in his computer. Besides frying his motherboard, HDD, CD-ROM and sound card, when he opened the PSU to check it, one of the big capacitors blew up and almost hit him in the eye. You can probably imagine he was not very happy about it, having to buy almost an entire computer because of a PSU. Personally, I would not want that to happen to me, so I prefer to stay away from cheap PSUs. Not even all PSUs rated 400W or more can handle the stress from a modern rig, especially a fully loaded one, or even an overclocked computer. That is because maybe the computer draws more power from a certain line, say the +5V line for example. Standard PSUs have some limitations when it comes to power lines, the so called "combined power". Say you have a PSU that can deliver 30Amps on the +3.3V line, 35A on the +5V line and 18A on the +12V line, that is 100W on the 3.3V line, 165W on the +5V line and 228W on the +12V line. With the power from the -5V, -12V and 5VStb lines, that sums up to about 500W max load, right? Right, but you might find out that this overkill of a PSU cannot handle your overclocked rig. Why? Well, because of the "combined power" limitations. This PSU can probably only handle a max of 200W on the +3.3V and +5V lines, when these lines are used at the same time. But if you add the maximum power on these lines you'll get 265W. That is combined power limitation, when lines used at the same time can only deliver so much power. Unfortunately, this will affect most overclocked computers because the CPU gets its power from the +5V line (or sometimes from the +12V line), while the RAM and video card get most of their power from the +3.3V line. So be careful when choosing a PSU, make sure you read all the specifications. And generally, a product's quality is as high as its price. All this talk about PSUs brings us to the subject of today's review, Antec's TruePower 550 power supply unit. Antec is a very well known company for the quality of their products. If you haven't heard of them by now, it is time you should, so read on. Those of you that have heard of Antec probably won't need my advice to read on ;-) Like I said, the subject of this review is the Truepower 550watt PSU. This sounds like a real overkill for the normal user, but to overclockers and enthusiasts it sounds like a dream. So, before we go any further, here are the specifications.
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 27 June 2007 ) |
