Antec TrueControl II 550 PSU Review

As we have often said before here at Bjorn3D, the power supply is often one of the parts of a performance computer that gets skimped on. NVIDIA helped change all that by starting up the SLI market again. Running dual video cards requires a very stable power supply, and that is why NVIDIA came up with its SLI-approved power supply list. The list can be found here: http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_build.html.

Now here comes my story that lead to this review. I have a PC Power and Cooling 510 SLI approved power supply, and it worked well with my 6800 GTs and 7800 GTXs in SLI. Then the problem came. I got a pair of 7800 GTX 512MB cards. These cards draw more power than the normal 7800 GTXs and caused my machine to not even be able to run a 3D application. The machine would just shut down, as if I had just pulled the power cord. This became a problem fast since I was on deadline for a preview of the cards. So, I grabbed an Antec 550 EPS12V that I had on the shelf and was able to do the preview. The problem with this solution in the long run was this power supply was built before PCI Express and had very few SATA connectors. Needless to say, the inside of my PC looked like a pile of spaghetti.

This is when Antec was nice enough to supply me with the Antec TrueControl II 550 to use. So let's look at the specification of the True Control power supply.