Spire RockeTeer V SP-500W

Performance:

In order to test the Spire RockeTeer V SP-500W we turned to one of our usual open-air PSU testing setups. The system was powered by Tyan's Tomcat K8E-SLI motherboard, which is Socket 939 Athlon 64 supportive yet uses NVIDIA's nForce Professional 2200 Chipset. The system used 2GB of RAM running at PC-4000 speeds while the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ was running at 2.25GHz thanks to a 250MHz bus. Another power hungry component in this system was the EVGA 7900GT CO SUPERCLOCKED 256MB, for which we have been using in quite a few tests lately. Below is the rundown of system components.

Before moving onto sharing our results, we examined the noise level as well as airflow throughout the system was it was running in our open-air environment. With the turbo fan switch enabled, which turned on the 120mm fan, the power supply was certainly loud, and however, the fan is only designed to be used in seriously strenuous environments where the PSU operating temperature exceeds 45°C. When only the 80mm exhaust fan was powered, there was moderate airflow throughout the system and the PSU was certainly on the quiet side of things. Resorting to our traditional Linux PSU testing techniques, we focused on the usual idle and load areas. Idling involved letting the system run inside of GNOME for 30 minutes with no other major programs actively running and power management features (i.e. screensaver) disabled. As for the load, we used CPU Burn-In v1.00 for 30 minutes while looping the Doom 3 time-demo. Measuring the voltages was a WinMax Global WIN9696 digital multimeter.