Mutant Mods' The Reactor - 480 Watt PSU

Posted: 2004-09-06 by MikeC

Benchmarking

The system that the Reactor power supply was installed in had the following specifications:

CPU
AMD Athlon 64 3200+

Motherboard
Chaintech VNF3-250

RAM
Corsair TwinX 2x 256MB PC-3200

Video Card
ATI Radeon AIW 9600XT

Hard Drive
2 Seagate Barracuda SATA 80GB (Striped Array)

Voltage measurements were taken using Motherboard Monitor. The system was allowed to run for a full day to see what kind of power fluctuations would occur in each individual rails. After 20000 readouts, these are the results.

As we can see with the screenshot, the power supply is extremely stable with only a variant of 5% in the core 0 voltage, 1% in the Core 1 voltage, 2% in the +3.3 volts, 1.5% in the +5.0 volts, 2.6% in the +12.00 volts and 4% in the -12.00 volts. This is extremely acceptible, as the highest variance is 5%.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Mutant Mods Reactor 480 Watt power supply unit made by StarTech.com is genuinely a great product. The main focus of any power supply is to deliver clean power to all of your peripherals without too much fluctuation in voltage. Voltage fluctuations will most likely cause system instability, which will hinder performance and over clocking. However, the Reactor doesn’t suffer from fluctuating voltages, and delivers extremely stable power to your computer.

Secondary to delivering clean power to your system, the Reactor is charged with giving your computer a nice clean modded look without the hassle of modding your power supply yourself. The chrome blue finish was nice and clean when received and the LED lights from the fans shone brightly when the unit was on. As mentioned earlier, different colors would be greatly appreciated, since not all of us have blue cases or blue LEDs.

Pros