VisionTek 800W 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply (900349)

Methodology & Results

Testing Power Supplies I generally put them to heavy use for several days to break them in a bit. During actual testing I run the machine a couple of hours gaming to get everything heated up. If I’m not running SLI I put in a power-hungry GPU or use one with a physics card behind it. I’m in a nostalgic mood this review so I’m going to break out my Palit 4870X2 dual GPU single card toaster. The pull on the Palit 4870×2 is heavy by today’s standards and should provide a good load on the power supply. I Run for a couple of hours, then drop back to an Idle and test the PSU. After Idle testing I load it as heavy as I can get it within reason then test it at load.

I Measure the 12v, 3.3v and 5v rails on all PSU, I measure the heat exhaust using an infra-red thermometer. If there’s any real noise from the fan I measure that with a Decibel meter but that reading is influenced by chassis noises other than PSU. I test the Rails cold using a dedicated power supply tester but don’t lend much credence to any tester that simulates load.  I run all tests a minimum of 5 times. I take the best score and the worst score and ignore them leaving the three median scores and report the average of the three median runs. If I get an out of range score on a test run (something obviously hinkey) I throw out the anomalous score and re-run the test.

Test Rig

Testing Results

Power Consumption Measured at wall with a KillAWatt Device.

The results are in on the VisionTek 800w 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply and they are looking pretty good. Just as a FYI the test lab is in the Phoenix area in the West Valley and daytime temperatures are hitting 80° F so we tested in a non air-conditioned room at that temperature. Even given the extra heat the VisionTek 800w 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply stayed within 3% of nominal voltage on all tests. We ran the tests 3 separate times averaged the results and report the average here. The voltage regulation was tight enough that I let the PSU break in for a day or two more during ordinary use and retested. The retest yielded results in the same range and while we have seen tighter regulation on much more expensive units maintaining under 3% on a sub $90 unit with dual rails is a phenomenal result.

Thermally speaking the exhaust did reach a 55° C temperature which is pretty reasonable for the environment we tested in, Noise wise we hit 36 dBA which is about the noise in a quiet Library and we are satisfied with the performance of the VisionTek 800w 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply in all categories.