You want to quiet down your Ultra PSU?
Take the Ultra grill off and leave just the mesh. I found that most of that noise is caused by the obstruction of the Ultra logo.
Someone made the comment that you can't educate the ignorant... or stupid? I think it's mostly ignorance....
As some of you may know, I've gone from "light bulb testing" to actually aquiring a Sun Moon SM-268 load tester. I've seen the flaws of testing in BOTH arenas and have been taught some valuable lessons by someone that knows a hell of a lot more about power supplies than myself or anyone else here.
Wildly fluctuating 12V rail: In UNREALISTIC LOAD TESTS (as most are) you will see wild fluctuation of the voltage if one rail is loaded significantly, but another is not. So where as an Ultra can light up "more lightbulbs" than another PSU, OF COURSE the rail's voltage is going to fluctuate dramatically because the load on the 5V is not at a realistic level, or ratio if you will. These are switching power supplies. Rails are completely dependant on each other. Take a PSU like an Antec that has a ridiculous amount of amperage available on the 5V and hardly anything on the 12V and you're not going to light up as many light bulbs, but you will have very stable voltage readings. If you were to string up a bunch of 5V light bulbs, on the other hand, you'd light up more light bulbs, but then see the voltage fluctuate wildly just as they did on the Ultra.
This is why I will be using my Sun Moon to actually test three different hypothetical builds. Sure I'll do a 0 load test and a full load per label test, but I'll actually do a hypothetical 5V regulated CPU build (high 5V load), a hypothetical 12V regulated CPU with either SLI or RAID 5 (high 12V load) and a hypothetical "every day gamer's machine" with an AGP card and two hard drives in order to differentiate what PSU's are best for what as well as demostrate which one's are more stable under full load as per label and which are most efficient at 0 load. The more I read and the more I hear people argue, the more I realize there's no good PSU round ups on the net and the less I, or anyone else here, really knows about power supplies!
I just need to figure out where I'm going to post the results. For now, I'll probably just put them up on jonnyguru.com.
Also, Larry stated that a gamer would run their PC under maximum load? Larry.... Did you think that out before posting? Maximum load is full load on all rails. For a PC to run maximum load, not only would a person need to be "gaming" where they're probably maximizing 3.3V for their memory, and a good portion of 12V for their CPU and perhaps video card (depending on the video card,) but all of their drives would have to be running simultaneously, USB, Firewire and input devices would have to be running constantly and every PCI card in the case would have to be doing something or another. Maximum load is a synthetic number. It's the absolute maximum peak power that a PC is even capable of. It's not a ceiling for how much power you will draw at any constant rate.
Personally, I do not see any QC issues with the Ultra. You want to say the OCZ is "far superior?" Umm... There might be more people on this forum that has an OCZ over an Ultra, but I have both. The OCZ exhibits even WILDER voltage fluctuation under less strenuous loads on anything with a heavy 12V and 5V load (but looks fine when one is loaded and not the other. How odd. As if they expect you to plug in a bunch of hard drives and not use them. Or run a bunch of fans, but run an old school P!!! CPU.) Furthermore, under heavy load the OCZ has more ripple than a Ruffles potato chip. I'm in posession of more elaborate equipment to reflect this, but for the rest of you; just hook one up to a Kill-A-Watt and crank up the load. The wattage reading bounces all over the place.
Of course, that's all in extreme test-environment, worst case scenarios. Since 90% of you won't even get within 50% of that, you need to just not worry about it. Seriously.
I'm not going to say that Ultra makes a far superior PSU, and I'm not going to say that OCZ PSU's are crap. But for one to say that an OCZ is "far superior" than an Ultra or half of the other "enthusiasts" PSU's on the market is just a ridiculous statement.