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It really shouldn't come as any surprise that the thing that powers the entire of your PC needs to be of a certain quality. At worst, a dodgy power supply may catch fire, destroying not just your PC but potentially your home as well. On a slightly less drastic scale a low grade one will simply zap some or all of the components in your PC. Beyond that an under-rated or poor power supply will fail to maintain the steady voltages required to keep your computer running stably. This will result in programs freezing or your computer crashing altogether.

The basic measure of a good power supply is thus one that manages to deliver a steady voltage no matter how much current is being drawn by your computer. The degree to which the various voltage readings can fluctuate without leading to problems is laid out in the ATX12V+ specification. If a voltage strays just outside this level it isn't a guarantee that you will have problems but it's a situation best avoided.

Another key consideration when buying a power supply is its efficiency. It's an unavoidable fact that some energy is lost, mainly in the form of heat, during the voltage conversion process but where possible it's best to keep this loss to a minimum. Low quality power supplies may have an efficiency of only 60 per cent or less so for every 60W being actually used by your PC, 100W will be being drawn from the mains socket. Most decent quality modern supplies will manage at least 80 per cent efficiency and the best are now pushing 85+ per cent.

One of the key components in managing efficiency is power factor correction. This refers to a phenomena associated with AC circuits whereby the fluctuations in voltage and current get out of sync leading to inefficient transmission of power. The science of this is far beyond the remit of this article but essentially the power factor correction capabilities of a power supply are measured by a ratio of real power to apparent power where 1.0 is as good as it gets (indeed it's an impossible figure to obtain in a power supply of this type) and 0 represents a situation where the circuit is effectively non-functioning (no current is flowing). These figures are more often presented as percentages so good power factor correction will be 90 per cent upwards.

Once you've found a reliable and efficient power supply, the next thing to consider is how well it is cooled and how noisy it is. The benefits of these two factors are pretty self explanatory so we won't dwell on them any further.

Our penultimate factor for consideration is the physical design of the power supply. Many modern PSUs use a modular cabling system that lets you use only the cables you need rather than have to find somewhere in your case to stuff all the spare cabling. In the fancier PSUs you'll also get things like illuminated fans or manual fan speed controllers. So where relavent we'll applaud or lambast these features that we encounter.

Finally, once all other factors are taken into account there's the small matter of money to consider. After all it's all very well having the most feature packed and efficient PSU on the market, but if it's twice the price of the others then it's going to be of limited appeal. So, without further ado, let's get testing.

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