Ultra Products X-Finity 600W Titanium

Performance:

The installation of the power supply was quite simple. As with any other power supply we simply had to secure the unit to the case and then connect all of the cables. All of the cables were very long so there were no problems with components being too far from the unit. The power supply was installed on the following system:

The power supply that was previously installed in this testbed system was the ThermalTake Silent PurePower 420W. The unit was already proving to be slightly underpowered and we were suspecting that it was limiting our overclock. After we installed the Ultra X-Finity 600W our overclock indeed increased. Previously, we hit a wall at 220 FSB no matter what voltages or multipliers were used. With minimal tweaking we were able to achieve an overclock of 226 FSB which was stable for 8 hours (it could be longer, but we had stopped it when it hit 8 hours). We were very happy with the results. After our successful increase in overclock, we obtained the idle and load voltages. Since CPU Burn-In v1.00 (Linux) only stresses the CPU (+5V rail), we decided to test the rails for gaming as well, which would in turn stress the video card as well which runs on the +12V line. For idle voltages we let the system run for 30 minutes with no active processes. For our CPU load voltages we ran CPU Burn-In for 30 minutes and for gaming load we kicked ass in UT2K4 for another 30 minutes. A Craftsman digital multimeter was used to record all of the voltages.

Under load, the Ultra X-Finity 600W PSU was rock solid, deviating only 0.01 to 0.03 volts from idle voltages. This is less than 0.1% fluctuation! Even though the rails were all lower than ideal specifications, they were rock solid, which is much more important since electronic components such as the CPU don't generally respond well to fluctuating voltages and so it causes instability.

Conclusion:

Overall this power supply performed very well in our test system. The rails were rock solid and reasonably close to their ideal specifications. Switching to the X-Finity PSU even allowed us to attain a higher overclock than was possible before. Appearance wise this unit is also very nice. The mirror Titanium finish and LED fans were definitely a welcome improvement to the system. However we can't recommend this unit for anyone running a SLi setup or A64 setup, since they draw a substantially larger amount of power than the testbed used today. We weren't able to determine whether the slightly under-specification rails could handle yet another 6800 GT (draws about 77-123 Watts). However, we can recommend this unit to anyone looking with a system is similar to our testbed in terms of power draw. Overall we were very pleased with the results.

Pros:

· Titanium mirror finish
· Blue LED fans
· Rock solid rails
· Improved overclock
· Plentiful connectors

Cons:

· Relatively light for a 600w unit
· Questionable composition of unit
· Virtually no heatsinks
· Not all cables sleeved