AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 4: Power Supplies

Conclusion

All of the power supplies that could boot Test System #2 are more than fit to power your new Athlon system, but if we're going to crown a winner it would have to be the Antec PP-303X. There was a noticeable difference in stability between the units that placed at the top of our System Stress Test and those that came in at around 95%, while they all provided for stable operation, some were more prone to causing crashes under heavy stress than others.

You have to keep in mind that not everyone will be running as stressful as a setup as the one we put together here, but in an attempt to separate the best power supplies from the rest we had to go to those extremes. If you stick with the Antec PP-303X or the Delta Electronics DPS-338AB C rev.00 then you won't have to worry about your power supply causing any instability with your Athlon system.

While the Antec unit was the more stable of the two, our personal preference goes to the Delta Electronics unit simply because it is noticeably quieter. The Delta Electronics power supplies are generally found in Palo Alto cases.

The HIPRO model we tested wasn't recommended by AMD, nor is it a recent addition to the HIPRO line, it was just a unit we found sitting in one of our Inwin cases and we decided to give it a try. To our surprise the unit faired pretty well, partially as a result of its hefty 150W combined rating. If anything, this test was full of surprises.

It is interesting to note that the power supplies with the highest overall rating (400W) couldn't even boot our second test system while some of the 250W units came forward with 95% ratings. This is living, breathing evidence that a power supply's overall rating doesn't directly determine how good of a unit it is. Keep that in mind when you're building your Athlon system.

Be sure to read Part 1: Motherboards, Part 2: Overclocking and Part 3: Video Cards of our Athlon Buyer's Guide for more information