Published in Reviews

Cooler Master GX 750 W power supply tested

by on16 April 2010

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Unfortunately, we don’t have the equipment to put Cooler Master’s 80 Plus Silver Certificate to the test, so we opted on practical tests that will show whether Cooler Master’s new PSU has what it takes to drive a powerful gaming PC.

Our test is divided in two parts:

We first tested the GX 750W using a slightly older system based on MSI’s P45D3 Platinum, overclocked Intel Core 2 QX9770 Extreme Edition at 3.6GHz and Radeon HD 4870 X2. The rig ran on two hard disks, 2GB of OCZ’s DDR3-1600 Platinum memory, DVD writer, Hyper 212 Plus cooling and few fans. The first test shows that the GX 750W won’t break a sweat under a 500W and will run silent.

The second part of our testing is reserved for top performance and efficiency – meaning throwing pretty much everything we got at it. We ended up using EVGA’s high end X58 Classified 4-Way SLI, Intel’s Core i7 Extreme 965 overclocked to 4GHz and 6GB of Corsair’s Dominator 12800 memory. Since the motherboard is pretty large and couldn’t fit into the 960 II case (or any other case we have, for that matter) we performed our testing on an open platform using Cooler Master’s TestBench v1.0.

For our testing we used MSI’s N260 GTX and currently the fastest graphics card - the HD 5970. After we measured total system consumption in idle and active modes with both aforementioned graphics cards, we redid the same tests with XFX’s 850W Black Edition.

In the following tables you’ll see the difference in consumption between the two PSUs. The GX 750W is powerful enough to provide over 600W with no trouble, but we see that a power-hungry system such as ours won’t consider the GX 750W quite ideal. XFX’s 850W PSU is pricier, but more efficient as well and might save you a few euro on your yearly power bill.

Note that the comparison is probably not fair on the GX 750W, as it ran under a load of around 80%, whereas the stronger 850W Black Edition considers that same load as only about 70%. If we look at the total system consumption, the difference is about 3.1% or 19W. The same test system with N260 GTX rates the difference at 2.5% or 11W. Although results obviously prefer the XFX 850W Black Edition in systems that consume more, note that the price difference is around €50. This means that if you require below 600W for your rig, the XFX 850W might prove to be an overkill and probably financially unsound as any potential cash saving cash on your power bill saving won’t really pay off anytime soon to justify such a purchase.

Idle mode operation is another story altogether as the GX 750W shows that we’re talking about a quality PSU here – the difference is virtually nonexistent.

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The GX 750W ran quiet and stable. For a high-end system such as ours, having a quality PSU is crucial, and the GX 750W has what it takes.



Last modified on 16 April 2010
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