Installation & Testing
The HALE90 was installed in an Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 case. Installation took about 10 minutes since we routed many of the cables on the backside of the case. Installation was made very easy since the HALE90 has modular cables. This means you only use the cables that you need and they rest don’t need to be plugged in. Also the cables that are hard-wired into the power supply were long enough to be run behind the back of the case. This is not always possible, so our hats go off to NZXT for that.
After we had the power supply installed we went ahead and powered on the system. Our system is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, Radeon 4870 X2 video card, 1TB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive and Cooler Master V6 GT CPU Cooler all inside the Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 case with 7 fans.
Initial spot checks on the 3.3V, 5V and 12V rails were 3.34V, 5.05V and 12.49V respectively. We will be comparing the HALE90 750W to the Cougar SX850 850W power supply we reviewed last week. We used OCCT in testing both power supplies. The results from the HALE90 are on the left and the results from the Cougar SX850 are on the right.
3.3V
5V
12V
We saw some ripple in the 3.3V and 5V rails, but none of the rails undervolted. The most impressive was the 12V rail, which was completely stable through the entire test. It did not move at all!
