The first thing I like to do to with a new power supply is hook it up to to a basic tester to make sure all of the rails and power leads do indeed have current to them. Using my trusty Thermaltake Dr. Power II tester I plugged in all the leads and started it up. Look at the bottom of each picture below to see what power leads the test is referring to. Everything showed as “Live” and producing power so we are off to a good start!
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Next while in an idle state I hooked up a digital voltage meter and checked on the +12v and +5v rails, a strong reading was produced by each, which leaves a lot of head room for when the system is put under a heavy load.
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Short of having thousands of dollars in stand alone testing equipment about the only way to test a power supply is to put it under as much load as you can using software and measuring the voltage rail outputs. Using an EVGA P67 FTW loaded with an i7 2600K clocked at 5.0 Ghz and a pair of overclocked GTX 260 (SLI) video cards, we fired up the system and let it sit idle for 15 minutes for our idle readings. Once the idle reading were noted we ran simultaneous instances of LinX using the max memory option and Furmark. LinX will put a massive load on the CPU and memory while Furmark will load up the graphics cards. Below are the results of the idle and load testing (click on image for large view).
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