WEBVTT

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this is the most popular power supply on

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the market but is that really a smart thing the truth is that it's really hard

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to know that's why eight years ago we stopped making power supply videos all

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together because doing them properly takes tens of thousands of dollars of

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equipment and years of education and doing them halfway is basically

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meaningless but people still need power supplies so what do they do well they

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can either go a hive mind and buy whatever's popular or the smart folks

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have been relying on Community Resources like the LTT Forum power supply tier

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list unfortunately as we're about to find out a community of enthusiasts

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however well-intentioned doesn't always

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get it right for example they were right

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about the thermaltake smart Series this thing is truly C tier at best it didn't

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even survive our testing but there's another unit that turned out to be

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really solid even though it's actually buried with the other C tiers just like

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I bear carried this lazy sea tier segue to our sponsor iFixit celebrate ifixit's

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20th anniversary and grab yourself a Pro-Tech tool kit this summer using the

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link below there are two main questions we set out to answer today one is the

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Smart series from thermaltake that bad and two if it is and it is what can we

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recommend for Gamers on a budget in the long term the goal for the Labs team

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here is to test basically every Power Supply on the market and then capture

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the data in an easily digestible format unfortunately that's a ways off so to

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get you some answers faster we ran through just enough models to provide a

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Baseline and a confident recommendation

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with that in mind then let's look at the test setup the big change is we finally

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have the last piece we need to test more

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than just the basics an oscilloscope or well more accurately we have three

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oscilloscopes we're only going to need one in the end but like you know you

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should drive more than one car before you write the check and take it home and

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these have car level price tags so we wanted to test drive at least a few of

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them an oscilloscope doesn't just allow us to perform more tests more crucially

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it allows us to verify that our tests are actually doing what we think they're

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doing which we need because we now have a lot of tests this one I'm running

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right now for example is part of the ATX specification it's called the timing

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test and it ensures that when the power supply gets jumpered and turns on and

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turns off the rails come up to the levels that you expect in the order that

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you expect this allows the system to wake from sleep and go back to sleep

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predictably now we don't just run this once we've got light loads heavy loads

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actually you can see there's an uh our

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list of tests that it's going to go through that takes about four hours the

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good news is that the suite should be able to run once we've got everything

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dialed in with zero human intervention required all culminating in this

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okay we have a lot of work to do to make

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this readable by those of us who are not robots also as I'm sure you've guessed

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this nest of wires here will not exist

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in the final setup and it's worth noting that adding extra wire length will have

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some adverse effects including dropping our voltage readings a little bit we've

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got big plans to enhance the test Suite still though so I just want you guys to

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know that the numbers in this video are only intended to be compared to each

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other and to collect feedback from our community on what you guys want to see

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included in the future this won't make it into our final database enough

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Preamble though let's take a closer look at our contenders as a baseline for a

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quality unit we've got the seasonic prime TX 650 but the main Showdown that

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we're interested in here is the EVGA 450br versus the thermaltake smart 600.

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these two fifty dollar specimens perfectly demonstrate why buying a power

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supply on a budget can and be really challenging and part of that is the

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manufacturer's fault I mean you would think that price being equal obviously

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you want the one that can provide a third more power right

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but as it turns out surprise the big number on the box

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doesn't tell the whole story if we look closely we can see that while the

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thermal take smart 600 is technically a 600 watt power supply

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unlike most 600 watt units it's actually

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only able to deliver about 500 watts on

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the 12 volt Rail and it relies on the 5 volt and 3.3 volt rails to make up the

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rest now in the past you might have had three or four hard drives in your

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computer and a couple of CD burners but

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these days most people don't have any of that stuff and a single strong 12 volt

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rail is preferred with that said though 504 watts is still

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more than 450. so all other things being equal EVGA it's kind of looking like the

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loser here of course all other things are not equal

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shifting gears you might have noticed that our thermaltake unit is only

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certified 80 plus white which means that our 80 plus bronze Challenger could have

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up to a five percent advantage in efficiency depending on the load which

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brings us to the end of what we can learn from reading boxes and to the

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beginning of our testing in the real

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world the EVGA was actually only one to

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two percent more efficient that's an amount that you aren't likely to notice

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on your monthly power bill so let's dig deeper

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realistically the main concern with a 50 power supply is can this work reliably

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without burning my house down so we'll

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start with ShortCircuit testing seriously you guys this will be

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automated we have a whole box that does all this stuff as part of the power

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supply tester but in order to illustrate what's happening in the event that

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something bad were to happen in your computer say uh plastic connector melted

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or something like that and the wires ended up touching each other you would

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end up with a ShortCircuit if the power supply stayed on even at 12 volts it

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could start to push a serious amount of amperage heating up those wires melting

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plastic and causing a fire so what you want to happen is when you touch these

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the voltage should go to zero the power supply should have to be reset

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whoa and I had them touching again when I did that see look the system works and

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now it's back on this Corsair unit worked perfectly the

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good news is all the power supplies we tested including thermaltake smart had

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no problem with the ShortCircuit test and that's good because if they did they

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are literal fire hazards and should not be legal to sell

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up next is over current protection in

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this test each rail which is essentially each voltage the power supply can

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deliver gets loaded up to see how much

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power it'll put out before shutting off and this one is a balancing act for

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manufacturers I mean they don't want your system to just

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shut off if there's a momentary spike in power draw during a gaming session and

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it goes to 505 Watts but if you were to exceed the

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rating of a power Supply's internal components over a long period you could

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easily damage them now at first glance it seemed like our smart 600 was really

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able to dish out the power delivering a staggering 71 amps on the 12 volt rail

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before it shut off that's nearly as much as our premium csonic reference unit

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that costs over four times as much and

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at 12 volts that would be 840 Watts man

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you go thermaltake except there's a small problem

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while it was delivering that 71 amps the

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smart 600 here dropped down to an appalling 8.6 volts on the 12 volt rail

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that is so low that any real computer

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that was connected to it would be off at

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best and it gets even worse over Power

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Protection is similar to over current protection but is meant to protect the

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entire unit when all the rails are loaded at the same time now the good

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news here is that overpower protection did work on all of our units the bad

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news is that if overpower protection only works one time we consider that to

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be a fail and after tripping the overpower protection on our smart 600

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watt it never turned back on again you can pay your respects by purchasing our

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new capacitor water bottle on lttstore.com so I'd much rather take the

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530 Watts that the EVGA BR 450 was able

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to deliver knowing that if I ever did to overload it it would be able to turn

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back on which earns it a link to buy down in the video description so uh wow

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Linus good job

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the conclusion is to just buy from a reputable brand like EVGA and then

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you're good to go not so fast this is

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the EVGA 401 and at first glance it looks like a

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pretty good deal it's forty dollars so

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you'd probably expect it to be basically a slightly less powerful 450 BR then but

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oh no this one is a doozy to understand just why the 400n1 is so terrible we

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need to talk about power factor correction or PFC the power factor of a

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power supply is the ratio of true power aka the power that's being used to run

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your computer and apparent power which

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is how much power the electricity company has to supply but wait why would

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your utility company have to supply extra power that you didn't use in your

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PC ah if your power supply has a bad

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power factor it's essentially pushing back against the AC Source from the wall

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so even though you didn't use that power the power company still had to deliver a

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bit extra to compensate for your power supply sending bad power back through

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the lines typically this is negligible since your power supply should overcome

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this by having the current draw be in Phase with the AC Source but I bring all

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of this up because the EVGA 400n1 has

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the worst power factor correction that we've ever tested every other unit we

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tested had a power factor of nearly 0.99

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that means that 99 of the electricity

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that you're pulling is being turned into useful work

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with the EVGA 400n1 the power factor is

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about 0.5 to put real numbers to this with the

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Corsair sf-450 we've been using this one to validate a lot of our test Suite it

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was able to deliver 471 Watts while drawing 4.9 amps from

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the wall with the EVGA 400n1 it was able

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to do 427 Watts while it was drawing

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9.3 amps from the wall fortunately in

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most residential settings you will only be charged for True power so this won't

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directly affect your energy bill but it is horribly inefficient for the power

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grid making things even worse the AC to

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DC conversion efficiency of the 401 is

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also trash coming in nearly five percent worse than the br450 as the cherry on

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top after our overpower protection test the 401

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never turned on again so there's some good news and some bad news here the bad

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news is you just can't trust that manufacturers will highlight the most

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relevant numbers on their boxes and you also can't trust that a reputable brand

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will always be reputable the good news

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is that this means that this was an

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excellent investment and there is so

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much more to come in the future we've only scratched the surface of what our

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power supply tester is capable of today we focused on the basics like efficiency

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and safety protections because for Budget power supplies that's what

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matters the most but as our test methodology improves so will the

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conclusions we'll be able to draw telling who makes the best you know 1

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000 watt 80 plus titanium power supply well that's going to come down to much

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more subtle things like how solid is the

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12 volt when you suddenly load it up does the power supply introduce any

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noise into the circuit How about if the power is dirty in your region or you

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experience frequent brownouts we've had many in overclock suddenly fail When we

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arrive on set with lights and a bunch of other stuff plugged in we did actually

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try out some of these tests on our budget power supplies today and much

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like the rest of this video the thermaltake smart 600 and the EVGA 400n1

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did horribly while the EVGA 450br did a

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pretty decent job but the details of all of that weren't terribly important when

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two out of the three stopped working altogether so and I'm jazzed guys we are

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just a couple steps away from being able to attach a power supply to this thing

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press go and just bask and all the data

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and graphs that will prove precisely who makes the best power supply for your

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money I think the only thing more accurate is this Nano volt accurate

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tweezer is celebrate iFix its 20th anniversary at ifixit.com LTT or at the

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link below if you guys enjoyed this video why don't you go check out how

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power supplies work turbo nerd Edition it'll give you a good foundation to

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understand some of the upcoming content