so today I'm having a look at a pretty cool product from antech these kinds of
devices have been on the market for a number of years but this one's got all
the latest upto-date features and everything so this is the antech digital
PC power tester so I have conveniently a
PC next to me I'm going to go ahead and shut it down so this is just a quick
quick and dirty way to find out if your power supply is functioning as intended
so you know I hate plastic clam shells
that have these these metal grommets through them it's so hard to
open have to like heave on them just to get plastic
to break okay so let's see what we have inside here to start with besides
dropping the digital tester okay so now I can't even get the
paper off without ripping it that's too bad that's okay all right so there's no
documentation they basically expect you to know how it works here let's see is
this test your ATX power supply quickly
easily and accurately with anex digital PC power Tester the simple tool for
checking the health of your atx2 or 24 pin power supply diagnose the problem
and save time on troubleshooting so a lot of the time PC trouble can be caused
by any number of things and you have no way of knowing exactly what's causing
the issue so this allows you to test a 20 pin connector it allows you to
test a four pin or8 pin um CPU connector
six pin PCI Express and four pin floppy and then I'm going to go ahead and guess
that in here is a Molex no what is that oh that's SATA
okay so there's SATA on that side and then in here I'm going to guess this is
a MOX MOX connector okay so why don't we plug this into the power supply that we
already know is functioning so that makes things that makes life a little
bit easier here let's just unplug that from the classified board that I've got
on my test bench here okay so we plug PL
that in just like that we got the four pins see you can see the 20 and four
pins that's lined up there look at
that so it gets the it sets the power supply running so you can see the fan is
now spinning in the power supply even though I haven't powered it on because
it actually shorts out the
um uh the pins required to get it going
okay there that was awkward so it gives us readouts of the 5vt rail 12v 1 3.3
Vol - 12 vol 12v 2 now this is a single rail power
supply so obviously that rail 12v 2 is
not functioning 5 volb and
then I don't actually know okay so let's see what else we got let's plug in the
six pin and see if it shows us anything
different oh okay so 12vt 2 I guess it's just it will read off another connector
you can see that the two readings are exactly the same so that's um something
that would indicate to us that it is a single rail power supply you know what let's try something completely different
here give me like just bear with me one moment I'm going to plug this back into
the motherboard and I want to try this while the system's running and see if it
actually gives us any any readout i' I've never used one of these before
because I usually have just like another power supply on hand that I can test
with so why don't we just plug that all that stuff back in let's power up the
system and then I'm going to go ahead and grab another modular cable for this
power supply I'm going to grab a SATA cable okay plug that into the uh fractal
design power supply I got here okay SATA
was on this side and let's just plug this in and see what happens so I think
it goes this way yeah I think it goes
that way okay so it just oh this is different
so it gives us a little indicator light so when you don't actually plug in the
24 pin it just shows you yes all rails are actually functioning as intended so
I'm guessing it would do the same thing if we plugged in say for example
a PCI Express connector so let's try that too PCI Express plug in the modular
cable sorry this is taking so long I wasn't expecting to do this aspect of
the test but since we're here we have
nowhere important to be why don't we just do it okay so this goes in this way
and that tells us a lot less
so it looks like the these connectors only work if you've actually got the 24
pin connector in whereas the Molex and SATA connectors which are on the sides
of the unit give you more of an indicator uh more of an indication of
whether you've got the correct power being provided so thanks for checking out my unboxing and quick guide on the
antech digital power supply tester