Antec Phantom 500W Power Supply

[Rob Williams]

Power supplies are an important part of our PC and should never be overlooked. Antec is one of the top makers in the market, due to their stability and build quality. We are taking a look at their 500W Phantom and see how it stands up to a Dual Core system.

Discuss the review here!

[madmat]

Pretty schpankity PSU there boyo. When that PSU was first made nVidia required 550W for SLI certification but recently they dropped it to 500W. Makes me wonder if Antec will resubmit it.

The 12V rails are exactly the same amp wise as the X-2 by Ultra and it's a 550W unit.

[Rob Williams]

Ahh, good info about the SLI Cert, I had no idea. The thing is though, they make NO mention that there are two PCI-E connectors, they state that there is "a PCI-E connector", so they completely disregard the second.

Interested in getting on,but have some concerns if it will run my future system which im buliding in da next 2 months. Also im from da caribbean & i hope it doesnt ka-puts on me while im gaming. Can i be assured that it run this set up

Current
Pentium 4 EE 3.2ghz oc @ 3.4ghz
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
2 gigs of Crucial (ballistis)
Leadtek 6800gt 256mgs
2 36.6 raptors
2 200gig Seagates
2 nec dual layer dvd burners
Silverstone tj05 case with 5 fans(2 120mm & 3 80mm)
Gigabyte 3d rocket heat sink

Future
Athlon 64 4400
MB:too many to choose from Asus,Dfi,evga
4 gigs corsair 3500 ll
2 Asus silent pipe 7800 gt

N.B. Case,heatsink,drives,hardrives stay da same. System on 24/7

Need some advice or wait till dey release a more powerful phantom

[Rob Williams]

Be warned that 4GB currently does not operate under Windows XP SP2. I will let Matt answer your question about the PSU though, he knows more than I do about what it could handle

[Jakal]

If you're going with a Sli setup I'd suggest at least 550-600w. Considering the 4 hard drives and 4 sticks of memory, you'll need a fairly powerful psu to support your devices. I used a utility called Overclockulator, and it's got a power conversion chart in it. I guessed at a little of it, but the results shouldn't be too far out of spec.

[madmat]

That overclockulator isn't worth the time it takes to download.

The Phantom has as much power on it's 12V rails as most 550W units do.

If you're going to stick with the 7800GTs in SLI you'll have plenty of power but if you plan to move up to a bigger pair like the 512MB 7800GTXs in the future you might want to consider a Seasonic 600W as you'll be looking at 100W per card and 100+W on your CPU especially if you're overclocking.

The GTs draw around 60W per card, 70W when overclocked.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, forego the 4 gigs of ram, Windows won't allocate more than 3 gigs and the nForce 4 chipset won't allow you to run with 1T command rate with 4 sticks of ram in the board which really slows your memory timings down by a considerable margin.

An example is with 4 gigs in an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe with 4 gigs of CAS 2-3-2-5 2T ram the bandwidth was 4700MB/s and the same board and ram with 2 gigs at 1T it was 5000MB/s. That's a 300MB/s improvement which is like going from 3-4-4-8 1T to 2-3-2-5 1T. That a big improvement in latencies.

Windows won't allocate over 2 gigs to any one process anyways so why bother messing with it? Save that money to use for something else that will net you an improvement like a good water cooling setup.

[madmat]

Here's a better PSU Calc that allows you to break the load up by REALISTIC numbers...for instance: 13W per SATA HDD 25W is way high.

http://extreme.outervision.com/index.jsp

Going with the calc I linked to at default 80% utilization your new system (with a D5 water pump ) shows it needs a 499W PSU and that's throwing in 2 optical drives and 4 hdds and a fan controller.