Testing the power supply meant stressing the system in different ways and recording the voltage levels. Readings were then taken with a digital volt meter at the 12 Volt Auxiliary power connector, and at a Molex connector. With Prime 95 and 3D Mark 03 running, I also had performed defrag operation on the internal SATA "C:" drive. Add to this a simultaneous virus check on an external USB drive hard drive while burning an ISO from a network drive.  That's one pretty busy system, and I'm happy to say that everything happened without a glitch.

     The voltage readings at idle with the volt meter certainly look a lot better than what the Gigabyte utility Easy Tune reports. The power supply does not come with any means of monitoring the RPM of the included fan. Probably because Antec doesn't think this fan will be spinning very fast very often.

     Conclusion........

     The Phantom lived up to its claim of being very quiet. Fan noise from the video cards and the CPU cooler easily drowned out any noise from the power supply. Once the 120mm fans that come bundled with the P180 were spun up, the noise of the video card and CPU fans quickly disappeared too. With a lot of emphasis being placed on the quiet computing experience, many manufacturers are making contributions to try and deliver that experience. The Phantom series from Antec certainly makes a very solid contribution to the effort. With connections for four SATA drives and two PCI Express video cards, the Phantom has more flexibility than most comparable power supplies. The Phantom 500 carries a retail price of $169.99 (as of 8 October, 2005) which makes it one of the most expensive 500 watt units currently available.