Gigabyte Aorus P850W Modular Power Supply Review

Testing And Product Thoughts

There are, on occasion, times when we have difficulty testing power supplies. This is often the case when the power supply has an unusual cable for the main motherboard/CPU inputs. Specifically, when the cable is a relay design. As such, unfortunately, when we attempted to test this on our bench, we were not able to get it to operate.

Now, as a backup option, we always have our test system in place to ensure that the power supply we are given is in working order. It would be rather silly not to rule out the obvious and what we can confirm is that while the power supply was entirely functional, it unfortunately just simply wasn’t compatible with our testing machine to provide results worthy of categorical confirmation.

We, therefore, have had to provide a far more basic template for testing.

Alternative Test

To test the power supply as a ‘real world’ simulation, we decided to attach it to our test bench. This bench is primarily used for cooling systems, but is, for all intents and purposes, a fully functioning PC.

• Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270
• Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHS
• Radeon R7 Passive GPU with 2GB VRAM
• 16GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz
• 512GB OCZ SSD
• Noctua NH-D12 Cooler.
• Lian Li T80 Test Bench
• All testing conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste

For this test, we connected the Auros P850w to the system. We then set the system to run in overclocked mode at 5gzh core speed as a means of being more demanding of the power supply. From there we ran several benchmarking tools including PCMark, 3D Mark and the Final Fantasy XV benchmarking tool. We did these to ensure that the system was operating at a near maximum load operation for both the CPU and GPU. This was done for a period over 2-hours to ensure a solid operational status asking the most (as possible) from all major system components.

While this methodology can not provide any usable test results (at least not by our usual methodology) we can conclude that the power supply ran faultlessly though-out. The passive mode of the fan was particularly notable as it only ran for 2-3 occasions during the more intense aspects of our testing.

So, what can we conclude? Well, in terms of actual figures, due to the incompatibility issue, we don’t have any firm test results. What we do know, however, is that the power supply ran without any issues and throughout it’s entire operation was exceptionally quiet! It might not be as detailed as usual, but we can at least confirm that to you!