Cooler Master’s 1000W PSU can handle overclocked FX-8150 & HD 6970-X4 QuadFire!

The PSU Test

Test Configuration – Hardware

• AMD FX-8150 (reference 3.6 GHz; overclocked to 4.4 GHz), supplied by AMD
• ASUS CrossHair V RoG AM3+  (latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x; onboard audio), supplied by AMD/ASUS.
• Kingston HyperX 4 GB DDR3-PC1800 RAM (2×2 GB), supplied by Kingston
• AMD HD 6990 (2 GB, overclocked to 880/1330MHz), supplied by AMD
• AMD HD 6970 (2 GB, reference clocked at 880/1330MHz), supplied by AMD
• AMD HD 6950 (2 GB, flashed to HD 6970 clocked at 880/1330MHz), supplied by AMD
• AMD Liquid Cooling CPU cooler built by Asetek, supplied by AMD
• 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive
• Philips DVD writer
• Cooler Master Silent Pro Platinum 1000W PSU, supplied by Cooler Master
• Thermaltake Chaser MK-I (Supplied by Thermaltake)
• Thermaltake Dr Power II, Supplied by Thermaltake
• Radio Shack Digital Multi-meter
• Kill-A-Watt meter

Test Configuration – Software

• ATi Catalyst 12-8; highest quality; all optimizations off 
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths; DX11 under DX11 paths.

The Test

Our Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Platinum can easily handle HD 6970-X3 Tri-Fire! Under extreme load, the system pulled over 850W from the wall and our Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Platinum PSU did not shut down or become unstable – our FX-8150 overclocked to 4.40GHz remained 100% stable.   Notice the PSU connects directly to the side panel fan using one of its 7V connectors for real convenience!Best of all, the voltages measured at all three rails by our digital multi-meter were incredibly solid – with almost no variance from start up through extreme load and to shutdown. Your precious hardware components will love Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Platinum stability.

Considering that the temperature in our test room was a constant 78-80F during the testing and the Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Platinum is also rated for 92% efficiency at 1000 watts at a correspondingly realistic temp; and the PSU did not shut down or become unstable. One would conclude that it definitely acts like a solid 1000 watt PSU. Cooler Master is evidently very conservative in its ratings.

Here are the standards:

• 3.3V – 3.125 to 3.465
• 5V – 4.75 to 5.25
• 12V – 11.4 to 12.6

We then installed our fourth GPU and our third HD 6970 for QuadFire-X4 and repeated all of our testing.  We monitored all of our rails individually from Post to the highest voltage used by the PSU when running most of our demanding games from our gaming suite. The 3.3v rail was dead on most of the time. We noted +.1V and no other variance at any wattage that we could give it. Everything else was within + or – .02 volts and probably our digital multimeter was incapable of being any more accurate. Whenever you use a digital multimeter make very sure that it is calibrated properly.

Below we are testing with Thermaltake’s Dr. Power II Universal Power Supply tester.

Everything is good to go!

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CrossFire-X4 or QuadFire wasn’t much more demanding power-wise than CrossFire-X3, TriFire.  Evidently our FX-8150 is too limited of a processor even at 4.4GHz to really use the fourth GPU.

However, every test that we threw at this power supply – all the demanding games in our benchmark suite – Cooler Master’s Silent Pro Platinum took in stride.   We saw well over 900W being pulled from the wall outlet by our PC system at peak during gaming (Battlefield 3, 3D Mark 11 and Vantage) and were able to capture this image.  There is plenty of power for our overclocked and extreme 3-video card/4-GPU PC system!Very impressive! This is a great power supply! Let’s wrap up this review and sum everything up in our conclusion.