woo look at her go here in my hands is
the power supply that's responsible for that fireworks display and guess what
guys we didn't try to kill it and it isn't from some random AliExpress brand
this unit has five stars on PC part picker and thousands of sales on Amazon
and yet it failed spectacularly during
routine testing for power supply circuit our Channel that's been testing Legions
of power supplies and along the way discovering that many power supply
manufacturers aren't so honest some are
over representing their products and wait some are underselling their
performance that's not what I expected well either way it's finally time to
take a look at our power supply Gauntlet and when I say Gauntlet I mean it
because our power supply testing process has resulted in a staggering 23% failure
rate really separating the good from the uh
well bright at least speaking of failure I just failed to do a segue to our
sponsor H MSI their core liquid a15 aiio
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today using our Link in the description 9 months ago now we launched our first
Labs team Channel PSU circuit and since then we've tested 39 power supplies nine
of which died at some point during our test Suite but we're getting ahead of
ourselves a little bit first it's time to take a look at our fully armed and
operational power supply station because
the keite among you might have noticed that it looks a little different from
how it looked 2 and 1/2 years ago when we first unboxed this bad boy starting
at the bottom we've got our AC source which is able to deliver 3 kilovolt amps
which is basically 3,000 Watts but not
quite because reasons this is enough for
us to test up to, 1600 W power power supplies because we need to be able to
briefly deliver 200% of the rated power
for the power supply for Excursion testing as for why it isn't exactly
double the reasons anyway above that we
have what chroma calls their onoff controller which is just a big relay
which is just a fancy name for switch then above that we have our short
circuit and over voltage protection tester moving up we have our DC power
source which we don't really use at this time and then above that we have our timing and noise analyzer which is
basically a headless oscilloscope with a host of relays that can be used to
automate functions like turning the power supply on or off or changing the
characteristics of our load say for example to add
capacitance then there's a shelf which does shelf things above the shelf we've
got the connection panel which allows easy connections so that poor Lucas
doesn't have to go splunking in the back of a rack every time a wire needs to be
plugged in of course the real meat and potatoes is up here our 13 loads an
unlucky number for many a power supply basically these guys use Moss feds to
dissipate the energy from our power supply as heat we've got 12 400 W loads
that can be strung together to fully load any rail on any power supply up to
1600 watts and then our 13th unit has
two 100 WT loads which we typically use for 5vt standby and- 12 volt since we
don't really need a big individual load for those it uh can get pretty warm
Behind These Guys and beside that is a digital multimeter which we use for the
well the seven thermocouples that go into our test chamber to measure ambient
air intake and exhaust air for the power supply and measures the connectors to
make sure that they don't you know melt
we don't publish our temperature results yet but it is something that we're working toward finally there's the crown
jewel of our tester our road and schwarts mxo 58 oscilloscope she's got
eight analog channels 16 digital channels which is nice but the real
benefit of this scope is the ease of programming and the nice waveforms you
get to look at truthfully we know we're kind of using the Ferrari of
oscilloscopes to go get groceries but
that can be worth it when you acquire this equipment and sometimes it takes
years to finally start using it which yeah yeah what's the deal with that okay
I do know the deal with that the chroma is not exactly user friendly or
documented making matters worse the programming is very similar to assembly
code which turned the automation process for our testing from a two-month project
to a 10mon project for poor Lucas
thankfully I didn't have to do it but now that it's finally done we can figure
out what power supplies are good and
which ones are not so good which brings us to an important question what makes a
power supply good well at its most basic level a good power supply must adhere to
the ATX specification and deliver these
voltages to your compy regardless of the kind of load that it's under or the
input power conditions now we don't follow exactly the ATX prescribed test
plan but we try wherever it's practical and our tests are heavily inspired by
ATX the good news is pretty much everything we've tested even the ones
that failed has pretty pry much operated within the ATX specification until it
didn't but the bad news is we have seen some big differences in efficiency in
simple terms the efficiency of a power supply is the percentage of the power
that you draw from the wall that gets turned into useful energy that your
computer can use now many manufacturers Market their power supplies with a
little 80 plus certification that you'll find on the box but in our testing there
were two power supplies whose measured efficiency didn't match their ratings
The Corsair SF 850l and the fsp Vita
850gm both of them actually exceeded
their rated deficiency a result that is validated actually by clear results own
80+ testing why would anybody Market
their unit as 80 plus gold when they could have labeled it 80 plus Platinum
instead when we talked to Corsair and fsp about this we got similar answers
from both of them these power supplies it turns out were designed to be gold
efficiency power supplies but then their Engineers went and did a bit too good of
a job and they exceeded their target but here's the thing even though their
tested units exceeded the target they're not confident that every single unit off
the line is going to hit Platinum efficiency so they decided they'd rather
be conservative with their ratings also in the case of Corsair the design team
had just Plum finished the box and label designs with that gold rating on it so
they ran with that we verify more than just 80 plus
though which honestly is kind of falling out of fashion and part of the reason
for that is 80 plus only factors in efficiency from 20% to 100% load so
instead we measure all the way from 2% load to 110% so that you know how your
power supply is going to perform when your computer's asleep all the way up to
when it is oops slightly overloaded now
I can't say that it'll make a big difference on your power bill if you
pick up a c850 or c1000 from Enz XT both
of which have outstanding 2% load power efficiency LTT hat Pro is off to them
what I will say is that this expanded testing scope helps us to separate the
overbuilt units from the underbuilt ones
while testing at 110% we have registered four power supply deaths total including
uh this one which is not a good result
in fairness to these power supplies 110% of rated power is out of spec and we
perform some of these tests with the input voltage and frequency being
slightly off to simulate non-ideal conditions but thing is with all of the
protections that a power supply is supposed to have an overpower or an
overcurrent event really shouldn't result in outrate Failure but sometimes
it does the game max power supply that we featured in the thumbnail the one
that Lucas is looking at here spectacular failed during this very test
the AC Source on the tester went into protection mode and when Lucas popped
the power supply out of the test chamber he wisely fired up his phone camera
plugged the unit into the wall and yeah
you don't want that going on inside your PC but I mean lonus and Lucas that was
probably just one bad unit right no see
here's the thing anytime a power supply dies during our testing we obtain
another one and almost every time the second unit has also
died across our overcurrent overpower
and ShortCircuit protection testing we've found six power supplies that have
gone to sleep permanently securing our
coveted we cannot recommend award see
while catastrophic failer protection is technically a recommended part of the
ATX specification we feel that any power
supply that you spend good money on should do three things one it should
protect you we can't have your house and there for you Lighting on fire number
two it should protect your computer you can't have your motherboard and
therefore your computer Lighting on fire and three it should protect itself we
can't have your power supply and therefore your power supply Lighting on
fire producing molten material or making startling
noises another surprisingly effective
killer has been our Brown out test which has claimed the lives of these three
power supplies this test is pretty simple you know when the lights flicker
briefly well we're testing to see how long that needs to last before your
computer will shut down we're not even looking at surges or anything like that
it just turns out that some power supplies really don't like power getting
turned off briefly and then back on a surprising non-k killer though is our
Excursion testing where we hit the power supply with a 150% load for 1
millisecond and then a 200% load for. 1
milliseconds to see how it'll handle something looking at you
gpus briefly drawing way more than it
should while this hasn't killed anything yet there are differences in performance
in these tests so if you plan on overclocking you're going to want to
look for a power supply with all green check marks here now that we know what
we're testing for let's set up a test why don't you explain step one because
it's not obvious to me looking at it yeah so the first thing we do we unbox
it find out any of the manufacturer's claims and write a lot of it down for
metadata that later gets up the loaded to the website then we go through input
and output ratings for the power to make sure that we're loading it correctly and
that the loads are properly portioned to it and configured for that so we're not
nailing it on one rail and then leaving another one alone and then we go through
and we decide what tests thrun on it which is exactly the same for all of our
standardized testing that we go up on PSU circuit and the lab's website and
then we take kind of an inventory of all the cables that comes with it and quick
measurements of the length so we have that data as well and then we can just run this cell in Python and some code
I've written on the back end uh generates a whole mess of data and files
that we can run off of I said step one you gave me what sounded like at least
like half a dozen steps that's great that's efficient step one 80 plus
Platinum this guy it's not even titanium I think
titanium is better next it's time for Lucas to turn on the tester and the
scope there a lot of buttons yeah now I
can even reach most of them next up we shove our power supply into the chamber
and reposition our thermal couples according to the exact physical
dimensions of the unit then it's time to plug into this guy connector board
interface board I don't know what it's called and it doesn't matter but shout
out cic for sending this thing over to us because it saves a ton of time we can
plug in as many connections as you could possibly find on a modern power supply
and the best part is this was some special work from Lucas some tedious
work from Lucas we take our measurements right at the bottom of where everything
plugs in which is important because otherwise the length of these wires
could affect our readings and we don't want that oh there's one more thing we
have a thermo couple that we plug right into the uh 12vt high power you know the
one that has a reputation for being kind of melty once everything's hooked up we
start our tests at 0 degre C then we
move to 20° C and finally 40° everything
is a automated except the temperature of this chamber we could automate that but
it's actually nice to have a few check-in times to make sure that
everything is looking good with the results our hardest tests are only done
at 20° C 16 hours later we get this
which as you can tell needs some processing but fortunately that's
automated by some code that Lucas wrote then from there we get a script template
for PSU circuit videos that gets filled in with the results that are sent to
Emily for the voice in the videos we we use 11 Labs an AI text to speech dubbing
service and specifically we use Brian because we like his voice the most it
can take a couple of tries to get a good read from Brian and I need to balance
how natural he sounds with how accurate his reading is some more Niche phrases
like ATX tend to trip them up 1 atx3
2024 manufactured by cesic each video
has a template with parts of the voice over that don't change in blue down here
and then I insert the generated voice above that in green then the footage and
Graphics get added in and after 2 to 3 hours of work we have a video now if
you've ever watched PSU circuit you're probably wondering why don't you guys
just have a human voice the videos and then have a human fully edit it and I
get it I would genuinely love to do that but let me put it this way so far on
this channel we have made an eyew watering $138 in AdSense
$138 plus a few bucks here and there from private internet access VPN
Affiliates and that's across all of the so the economics of humans doing that
stuff they just don't make any sense but
that doesn't mean that the Channel's going anywhere we are committed to continuing to test power supplies and
continuing to upload these videos because the data isn't just valuable to
viewers of the videos it's also incredibly valuable to LTT's ability to
do build videos that feature power supplies that we can truly stand behind
also if you don't like the AI voice you're not alone but you can just read
the articles at LTT Labs.com you'll even find some extra data there
you might even find this segue to our sponsor Microcenter March is Monitor
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click our Link in the description to check out their monitor Madness event
we'll also have another link there where you can get a free 128 gig flash drive
if you visit their new Santa Clara store when it opens this year if you guys
enjoyed this video why not check out the one we did on a 3,000 W power supply
where you can see what our testing capabilities used to be