cool I've been issued a challenge by the cameraman to start today's episode with
a word other than so so that was my attempt at it and
moving on we are going to be looking at power supplies today I get a lot of
personal messages on YouTube asking me for especially power supply
recommendations because everyone can look up benchmarks for a video card or a
CPU and everyone can look up a price that's easy okay I need this much
performance I want to pay this much easy done however for power supply it starts
to get a little bit more complicated because there's so much misinformation
out there about what kind of a power supply you need like for example you'll
see you'll see specs on a CPU like uh
140 Watts well that's a TDP that's not actually the wattage that that CPU
consumes from a power supply so there's there's and then you've got a video card
that might output uh you know a 150 watt
heat load but that's watts in heat so that's that's not useful for for this
either so basically I wanted to do a quick recommendation video on a basic
power supply that I think is just one of the best No Frills no gimmicks power
supplies out on the market now these two you look at them and they look pretty
similar but for power supply all of the important stuff is what goes on under
the plain metal casing so let's start with looking at what I would call uh not
a very solid power supply this is what I would consider a door stop okay so
there's no particular markings you can find uh you can find a rated output on
here so 18 amps total on the 12vt rail
is not very strong by today's standards the 12vt rail is very important so
that's part of what makes it a a budget Cheapo power supply okay you can see
that it doesn't have uh this is one that I use for testing fans actually but the
actual stock connectors on it are very few it doesn't even have a PCI Express
connector because honestly if you have a dedicated video card you shouldn't be
using a door stop power supply it also uses an 80 mm fan for cooling which
means it's not going to be as quiet as a quality power supply and it's not going
to run as cool so that brings us into what I believe is one of the best value
power supplies on the market this is the cic SS 400 it is a 400 wat power supply
and unless you're looking at a very basic system 400 WTS is pretty much
where I would start now yes you can probably power uh you know integrated
video AMD quad core with uh you know a
hard drive all your standard stuff off of 250 or even 300 watt power supply no
problem but a 400 wat power supply is going to be built a little bit better
you're going to get 80 plus bronze certification and you also get
expandability for the future that is a big thing that I always stress when
people ask me for a power supply recommendation is that it's not always
about what you're hooking up to it today it's more about what you may need to
hook up to it in the future so you can see this one it doesn't have all the
bells and whistles that you'll find on the higher-end models but what it does have is a 24 pin connector for the uh
for the motherboard it has either an8 pin or four pin connector so you can see
on a cheaper unit you might only find a four pin P4 connector okay so that gives
you the proper connectors you need for a modern motherboard it's got proper SATA
connectors so you got four SATA connectors which means you can actually
add more hard drives to your system whereas a really basic unit might only
have one or two SATA connectors on it I mean yeah you can use adapters but then
you're just adding more cable clutter and More in efficiencies to it and then
you've also got an adequate number of Molex connectors as well as one PCI
Express connector so really the 350 W 400 watt range is where you start
getting into power supplies that can genuinely power a dedicated graphics
card and a 400 watt unit like this with great efficiency is going to be good for
even up to like a mid-range video card like a 5770 so so this gets my
recommendation gold star um also yeah here's another thing to look at you can
see that when you start to look at a quality built power supply you find dual
12vt rails capable of providing up to 360 Watts combined so those 12vt rails
are almost capable of providing the full power of this power supply that's how
you can tell it's a modernly designed well-built unit because most modern
systems are going to rely very heavily on that 12volt rail you also get silence
cic is really known for their quiet power supplies and you can see that even
on their low-end models they equip them with 120 mm fans as well as 80 plus 80
plus goes a long way towards making sure that this fan is not spinning really
hard to get rid of excess heat from Ane efficiency you got a nice efficient unit
running a nice quiet 120 mil fan that's how you're going to make sure you have a
good power supply experience on the back
you've just got a standard honeycomb Grill so that's where the exhaust air is
going to come out from that 120 m F and then you got your standard power input
as well as an onoff switch this is very convenient that's another thing again
you may not find on a low-end power supply in order to completely cut the
power off from your system with this unit you have to pull the power cord
it's just not convenient like I know you don't have to turn off the system
manually at the back very often but if you ever do it's nice to have the switch
just those little things are what makes buying a decent quality power supply
very very important it also just does cost that much more and it's going to
give you better reliability overall for your computer because the power supply
is often one of the first things to fail so if you buy a good quality power
supply and a good quality motherboard that's the other big one then you can be
sure your system's going to last for a long time