PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1200 Watt PSU
Another power supply hit our test labs during our testing that was ESA certified and I though taking a look at what this unit provides should be a good indicator of how varying ESA devices will interact.
If you haven’t read about the PC Power Turbo-Cool 1200w PSU yet, I would highly recommend you check out Lee’s review of it – it’s definitely in a world of its own in terms of class and quality, not to mention price!
Installation of the power supply was pretty easy, though neither PC Power and Cooling nor NVIDIA really provide any instructions for built-it yourself ESA components. The PSU had a single connection of 5-pins that looked like it should just plug into any USB header, so that’s what we did.
Turning on the system resulted in some sweat on my forehead (killing a $600 power supply doesn’t sound fun to me) but no sparks and booting into Windows the computer found a new USB HID device and all was working well.
Plugging this power supply into a new system and install the appropriate NVIDIA control panel software allowed us to access the unit’s ESA information without a hitch. Here you can see the unit reports the heatsink temperature as well as the current being pulled by the various rails.
In the Performance menu of the NVIDIA control panel the PC Power Turbo-Cool 1200w-ESA unit displays almost the same information as the NV Monitor application but also indicates here how much wattage the 12V rail is currently pulling.
This is less information than the Tagan power supply provided: it had wattage and amperage reports for all the rails including 12V, 5V and 3V. We honestly would like to see all this information on the PC Power and Cooling unit as well and perhaps we’ll get these with a firmware update soon.
