Installation of the SuperFlower 700w PSU was easy. It is of moderate size, so it should fit in most cases. The modular nature of this PSU means that you only need add the cables you are actually going to use. As such, I only had to use 3 modular cables; one 8pin PCI-E (a 6-Pin is hardwired to the PSU), a molex ring and a sata ring. The braided cable looks great in my case.

Test System:

• CPU - Intel i5 760 @ 4GHz
• CPU Cooling – Noctua NH-D14 (as supplied by Noctua)
• Motherboard - MSI P55-GD65 (as supplied by MSI)
• GFX Card – Inno3D GTX580 OC Edition
• Sound – Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer
• PSU - On Review
• Memory - 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3  (as supplied by Crucial)
• Disks – Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB (as supplied by Crucial)
• Optical - Generic DVD RW
• Case – InWin Maelstrom
• On Review – Super Flower SF-700P14XE

To test the Super Flower SF-700P14XE PSU, I first took the voltage levels from the different connectors (as listed in the chart below) whilst my system was idle (using a digital multimeter), then took the same readings whilst my PC was under load.

Load was simulated by running MSIAfterburner (for GPU), Prime64 (For CPU), AVG Free Virus-Scan (for HDD). Additionally, I turned all my fans up to 100%.

The Super Flower performed very well during testing. The voltages are all within ATX regulations, and also within the 3% variance which is expected by enthusiasts. Even the PCI-E rails barely budged when powering my power-hungry GTX580 OC. The biggest variance was only 0.04v on both the CPU 12v 8-Pin and the GPU 12v PCI-E1 8pin. These variances are minimal, and really show the stability of this PSU when being tasked my test system.

During operation, I did not hear the PSU fan above the rest of my system fans. I tried turning down my system fans to minimum, and could still not hear the PSU fan above this – it is quite a quiet PSU!

Finally, my one niggle with this PSU is the blue-glow it has. Blue lighting within computers is quite a past trend; I much prefer to see red-glows. However, this is a minimal niggle, and it is also subjective - it might be that you love the blue-glow, and after all it isn’t too bright so it won’t annoy you either way.
 
Next Page – Conclusion