In Figure 14, you can see the power supply label containing all the power specs.

click to enlarge
Figure 14: Power supply label.

As you can see this power supply has two +12 V rails, which are distributed like this:

• +12V1 (solid yellow wire): Main motherboard cable, peripheral power connectors and SATA power connectors.
• +12V2 (yellow with black stripe wire): ATX12V/EPS12V and auxiliary video card power connectors.

In our opinion the outputs from this power supply are not well distributed. Today a typical PC pulls more current/power from the ATX12V/EPS12V and video card auxiliary connectors, and all these outputs are concentrated on the same rail, while +12V1 has only components that do not demand a lot of current/power.

A better distribution would be moving the EPS12V/ATX12V cable or the auxiliary video card power cable to +12V1.

Now let’s see if this power supply can really deliver 550 W.