this is the most popular power supply on
the market but is that really a smart thing the truth is that it's really hard
to know that's why eight years ago we stopped making power supply videos all
together because doing them properly takes tens of thousands of dollars of
equipment and years of education and doing them halfway is basically
meaningless but people still need power supplies so what do they do well they
can either go a hive mind and buy whatever's popular or the smart folks
have been relying on Community Resources like the LTT Forum power supply tier
list unfortunately as we're about to find out a community of enthusiasts
however well-intentioned doesn't always
get it right for example they were right
about the thermaltake smart Series this thing is truly C tier at best it didn't
even survive our testing but there's another unit that turned out to be
really solid even though it's actually buried with the other C tiers just like
I bear carried this lazy sea tier segue to our sponsor iFixit celebrate ifixit's
20th anniversary and grab yourself a Pro-Tech tool kit this summer using the
link below there are two main questions we set out to answer today one is the
Smart series from thermaltake that bad and two if it is and it is what can we
recommend for Gamers on a budget in the long term the goal for the Labs team
here is to test basically every Power Supply on the market and then capture
the data in an easily digestible format unfortunately that's a ways off so to
get you some answers faster we ran through just enough models to provide a
Baseline and a confident recommendation
with that in mind then let's look at the test setup the big change is we finally
have the last piece we need to test more
than just the basics an oscilloscope or well more accurately we have three
oscilloscopes we're only going to need one in the end but like you know you
should drive more than one car before you write the check and take it home and
these have car level price tags so we wanted to test drive at least a few of
them an oscilloscope doesn't just allow us to perform more tests more crucially
it allows us to verify that our tests are actually doing what we think they're
doing which we need because we now have a lot of tests this one I'm running
right now for example is part of the ATX specification it's called the timing
test and it ensures that when the power supply gets jumpered and turns on and
turns off the rails come up to the levels that you expect in the order that
you expect this allows the system to wake from sleep and go back to sleep
predictably now we don't just run this once we've got light loads heavy loads
actually you can see there's an uh our
list of tests that it's going to go through that takes about four hours the
good news is that the suite should be able to run once we've got everything
dialed in with zero human intervention required all culminating in this
okay we have a lot of work to do to make
this readable by those of us who are not robots also as I'm sure you've guessed
this nest of wires here will not exist
in the final setup and it's worth noting that adding extra wire length will have
some adverse effects including dropping our voltage readings a little bit we've
got big plans to enhance the test Suite still though so I just want you guys to
know that the numbers in this video are only intended to be compared to each
other and to collect feedback from our community on what you guys want to see
included in the future this won't make it into our final database enough
Preamble though let's take a closer look at our contenders as a baseline for a
quality unit we've got the seasonic prime TX 650 but the main Showdown that
we're interested in here is the EVGA 450br versus the thermaltake smart 600.
these two fifty dollar specimens perfectly demonstrate why buying a power
supply on a budget can and be really challenging and part of that is the
manufacturer's fault I mean you would think that price being equal obviously
you want the one that can provide a third more power right
but as it turns out surprise the big number on the box
doesn't tell the whole story if we look closely we can see that while the
thermal take smart 600 is technically a 600 watt power supply
unlike most 600 watt units it's actually
only able to deliver about 500 watts on
the 12 volt Rail and it relies on the 5 volt and 3.3 volt rails to make up the
rest now in the past you might have had three or four hard drives in your
computer and a couple of CD burners but
these days most people don't have any of that stuff and a single strong 12 volt
rail is preferred with that said though 504 watts is still
more than 450. so all other things being equal EVGA it's kind of looking like the
loser here of course all other things are not equal
shifting gears you might have noticed that our thermaltake unit is only
certified 80 plus white which means that our 80 plus bronze Challenger could have
up to a five percent advantage in efficiency depending on the load which
brings us to the end of what we can learn from reading boxes and to the
beginning of our testing in the real
world the EVGA was actually only one to
two percent more efficient that's an amount that you aren't likely to notice
on your monthly power bill so let's dig deeper
realistically the main concern with a 50 power supply is can this work reliably
without burning my house down so we'll
start with ShortCircuit testing seriously you guys this will be
automated we have a whole box that does all this stuff as part of the power
supply tester but in order to illustrate what's happening in the event that
something bad were to happen in your computer say uh plastic connector melted
or something like that and the wires ended up touching each other you would
end up with a ShortCircuit if the power supply stayed on even at 12 volts it
could start to push a serious amount of amperage heating up those wires melting
plastic and causing a fire so what you want to happen is when you touch these
the voltage should go to zero the power supply should have to be reset
whoa and I had them touching again when I did that see look the system works and
now it's back on this Corsair unit worked perfectly the
good news is all the power supplies we tested including thermaltake smart had
no problem with the ShortCircuit test and that's good because if they did they
are literal fire hazards and should not be legal to sell
up next is over current protection in
this test each rail which is essentially each voltage the power supply can
deliver gets loaded up to see how much
power it'll put out before shutting off and this one is a balancing act for
manufacturers I mean they don't want your system to just
shut off if there's a momentary spike in power draw during a gaming session and
it goes to 505 Watts but if you were to exceed the
rating of a power Supply's internal components over a long period you could
easily damage them now at first glance it seemed like our smart 600 was really
able to dish out the power delivering a staggering 71 amps on the 12 volt rail
before it shut off that's nearly as much as our premium csonic reference unit
that costs over four times as much and
at 12 volts that would be 840 Watts man
you go thermaltake except there's a small problem
while it was delivering that 71 amps the
smart 600 here dropped down to an appalling 8.6 volts on the 12 volt rail
that is so low that any real computer
that was connected to it would be off at
best and it gets even worse over Power
Protection is similar to over current protection but is meant to protect the
entire unit when all the rails are loaded at the same time now the good
news here is that overpower protection did work on all of our units the bad
news is that if overpower protection only works one time we consider that to
be a fail and after tripping the overpower protection on our smart 600
watt it never turned back on again you can pay your respects by purchasing our
new capacitor water bottle on lttstore.com so I'd much rather take the
530 Watts that the EVGA BR 450 was able
to deliver knowing that if I ever did to overload it it would be able to turn
back on which earns it a link to buy down in the video description so uh wow
Linus good job
the conclusion is to just buy from a reputable brand like EVGA and then
you're good to go not so fast this is
the EVGA 401 and at first glance it looks like a
pretty good deal it's forty dollars so
you'd probably expect it to be basically a slightly less powerful 450 BR then but
oh no this one is a doozy to understand just why the 400n1 is so terrible we
need to talk about power factor correction or PFC the power factor of a
power supply is the ratio of true power aka the power that's being used to run
your computer and apparent power which
is how much power the electricity company has to supply but wait why would
your utility company have to supply extra power that you didn't use in your
PC ah if your power supply has a bad
power factor it's essentially pushing back against the AC Source from the wall
so even though you didn't use that power the power company still had to deliver a
bit extra to compensate for your power supply sending bad power back through
the lines typically this is negligible since your power supply should overcome
this by having the current draw be in Phase with the AC Source but I bring all
of this up because the EVGA 400n1 has
the worst power factor correction that we've ever tested every other unit we
tested had a power factor of nearly 0.99
that means that 99 of the electricity
that you're pulling is being turned into useful work
with the EVGA 400n1 the power factor is
about 0.5 to put real numbers to this with the
Corsair sf-450 we've been using this one to validate a lot of our test Suite it
was able to deliver 471 Watts while drawing 4.9 amps from
the wall with the EVGA 400n1 it was able
to do 427 Watts while it was drawing
9.3 amps from the wall fortunately in
most residential settings you will only be charged for True power so this won't
directly affect your energy bill but it is horribly inefficient for the power
grid making things even worse the AC to
DC conversion efficiency of the 401 is
also trash coming in nearly five percent worse than the br450 as the cherry on
top after our overpower protection test the 401
never turned on again so there's some good news and some bad news here the bad
news is you just can't trust that manufacturers will highlight the most
relevant numbers on their boxes and you also can't trust that a reputable brand
will always be reputable the good news
is that this means that this was an
excellent investment and there is so
much more to come in the future we've only scratched the surface of what our
power supply tester is capable of today we focused on the basics like efficiency
and safety protections because for Budget power supplies that's what
matters the most but as our test methodology improves so will the
conclusions we'll be able to draw telling who makes the best you know 1
000 watt 80 plus titanium power supply well that's going to come down to much
more subtle things like how solid is the
12 volt when you suddenly load it up does the power supply introduce any
noise into the circuit How about if the power is dirty in your region or you
experience frequent brownouts we've had many in overclock suddenly fail When we
arrive on set with lights and a bunch of other stuff plugged in we did actually
try out some of these tests on our budget power supplies today and much
like the rest of this video the thermaltake smart 600 and the EVGA 400n1
did horribly while the EVGA 450br did a
pretty decent job but the details of all of that weren't terribly important when
two out of the three stopped working altogether so and I'm jazzed guys we are
just a couple steps away from being able to attach a power supply to this thing
press go and just bask and all the data
and graphs that will prove precisely who makes the best power supply for your
money I think the only thing more accurate is this Nano volt accurate
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link below if you guys enjoyed this video why don't you go check out how
power supplies work turbo nerd Edition it'll give you a good foundation to
understand some of the upcoming content