When it comes to testing a power supply, there are two courses to travel. One takes you down a path using a device to stress out the PSU and provide data regarding the power levels across all three rails. The second, and the one we make use of, utilizes an actual test system to give a more real-world account of what the power supply is capable of. While both methods have their merits, we prefer to use an actual computer to more closely resemble the manner of use that you, the potential customer, will put the product through.
That said; let us take a quick look at the test system. At the request of readers, we have beefed up the system to put a more realistic strain on the power supply.
Gigabyte 965P-DS4 motherboard (Supplied by Gigabyte) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor 2x 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8500-C5 memory (Supplied by Corsair) GeCube X1900XTX graphics (Supplied by GeCube) Western Digital 250GB SATA hard drive 2x Western Digital 160GB SATA hard drives Western Digital 80GB hard drive Sony 52x CD-ROM optical drive Samsung 16x DVD-R optical drive 2x 120mm fans 4x 80mm fans
While this is not a quad-GPU setup, we are certainly in the realm of having a system that is going to put a significant power drain on any power supply. Testing will consist of checking the power levels across all three rails at idle and again while the system is under stress. This should give us a good look at the capabilities of the power supply being tested.
Results
During testing, this power supply showed very steady results with very little in the way of voltage fluctuations. Power levels across all three rails fell just over their stated specifications and there were never any stability issues while testing. Since this power supply is not one of the types that are meant to keep a small city lit up, we tested with only a single video card, but it still eats a lot of power. Overall, the results speak very highly of the NX-8060 PSU from Nexus.
Of course, we had a few concerns when we began our testing. We generally hotwire all power supplies before testing and run a multimeter check on the three primary rails just to verify that everything is within spec. Imagine our surprise when we found the 3.3V rail reading a massive 3.708V! We installed the unit and tested initially with caution, but all went well throughout testing and the 3.3V rail was well within tolerance during all tests.
