Noise
The nice thing is that for conventional uses, this power supply will probably be one of the quieter components in your system. From the pictures, you’ll see that the fan that cools down the power supply has a plastic shim of sorts attached. This is done to control the flow of air over critical components, so I suggest our readers leave it in place unless they wish to install a very powerful and very noisy fan instead. Because of the location of the plastic shim, airflow directly hits the aluminum ribcage heatsink and flows back towards the rear of the power supply case. It seems sometimes the most simple and cost effective approach is the best way to go when cooling the Antec TruePower Trio 650, but perhaps a design that didn't need the extra plastic shim and was designed from the ground up to be extremely efficient at cooling itself would have been better. However, considering how quiet the power supply fan is, we doubt anyone would really care regardless. The fan used by the power supply itself is a 120 x 120 x 25mm Adda AD1212HB-A73GL made in China. It isn’t a top of the line fan, as it noticeably gets louder as more stress is imposed upon the system, but it works well and doesn’t get too noisy when the unit is really working hard.
Installation
As mentioned earlier, the unit comes prepackaged with screws to attach the power supply to your average case. This is where not having modular cables hurts the power supply. Before rushing to install the unit, we instead determined beforehand which cables we would need and which ones we didn't. The power cables that weren't being used were zip-tied and tucked as neatly as possible in the empty space behind the power supply and optical drive bay area. This made installation a bit simpler once we knew exactly what cables we were routing where so we didn't have to play tug-of-war with our cables, risk damaging any motherboard capacitors, or free up some space for improved airflow. Now if this PSU had been modular, this wouldn't have been much of an issue. But remember, we are trading bling for no-nonsense reliability. Individuals who are looking for a power supply that has better aesthetics are already looking at other units. Those who value the critical nature of power supply units will want to look at this unit, as the numbers on the next page indicate.
Testing
To test the power supply, we ran the system at stock and overclocked settings at both idle and fully loaded stress situations. We ran each stress test for over 6+ hours with Prime95 to stress the CPU, and ATI Tool v0.25 Beta 15 to stress our GPU. On lesser systems, Prime95 alone would cause stability problems at the first sign of any kind of error; accordingly, this would most certainly cause a hard crash within fifteen to sixty minutes. Tests were recorded with an electrical multimeter connected to the motherboard main power connector, as software monitoring programs are useless and often display incorrect numbers. Yes, this means even the numbers displayed in the system BIOS are likely to be false. Physically testing a PSU is the only real way to test, but this requires inserting and removing prongs from live electrical equipment, something many users find themselves uncomfortable with. This is why we are here! The primary aspect that is being tested is the stability of the PSU rails. Other hardware websites passionately offer additional numbers that are most certainly important when examining power supplies,. However, for our intents and purposes, we feel that rail stability, because of its inherent nature, is the most critical piece of the PSU and this determines the overall quality of the product. This is not to, in any way shape or form, diminish the testing methodologies that others may use and may go into depth with. One such item is peak power output, a number that has forever been one of the key aspects between a quality and completely useless power supply. In reality, most users will never reach the critical 100% on any system they will ever use in non-testing conditions.

So on to the bread and butter! The Antec TruePower Trio 650 never exhibited any problems and in fact performed very well. All the readings suggest that even though the power supply was stressed heavily, the increased voltages to the memory and overclocked speeds of the CPU and GPU weren’t nearly enough to stress this power supply at all. Individuals looking for a power supply to provide stable juice to multiple CPU’s and GPU’s should definitely consider this power supply. The values for each measurement are barely fluctuating at all. What is impressive is the actual abundance of voltage on each line, which means this system is hardly even touching the surface when it comes to the power of this PSU. A 40% overclock is not something to fool around with if you don't have an adequate power source that provides stable and clean power. The Antec TruePower Trio 650 provides this, and does so impressively. Such endurance, even under such a heavy load for hours on end, is a testament to the careful balance that Antec has correctly chosen when considering the right quality components for the right price.