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,
or a 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, uh!
Nine 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.
Next it's time to take a look at our fully armed and operational power supply station.
Because the keen eye to mountain you might have noticed that it looks a little different
from how it looked two and a half years ago when we first unboxed this bad boy. Starting
at the bottom, we've got our AC source, which is able to deliver three kilovolt amps, which
is basically 3,000 watts, but not quite because reasons. This is enough for us to test up
to 1,600 watt 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 on-off controller, which
is just a big relay, which is just a fancy name for switch. Then above that we have our
ShortCircuit and overvoltage 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 spelunking 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 MOSFETs to dissipate the energy
from our power supply as heat. We've got 12 400 watt 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 watt loads, which we typically use for 5 volts standby and minus 12 volts since
we don't really need a big individual load for those. It can get pretty warm behind these
guys. And beside that is a digital multimeter, which we use for 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 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 in Schwartz NXO 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,
it's not exactly user friendly or documented. Making matters worse, the programming is very
similar to assembly code, which turns the automation process for our testing from a
two month project to a 10 month 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 copy 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 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 SF850L and the FSP Vita 850GM. Both of them actually
exceeded their rated efficiency, a result that is validated actually by ClearResult's own
80 plus 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 plumb 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 is 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 NZXT, both of which have outstanding 2% load power efficiency, LTT hat pros 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 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 the 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 outright failure. But sometimes it does. The GameMax power supply that we featured in the
thumbnail, the one that Lucas is looking at here spectacularly 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, Linus 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 failure 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 therefore you, lighting on fire.
Number two, it should protect your computer. We 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 brownout 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-killer, though, is our excursion testing, where we hit the power supply with a
150% load for one millisecond and then a 200% load for 0.1 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 our 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 uploaded 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 are run on it, which is exactly the same for all of our standardized testing that we
go up on PSU circuit in 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
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's 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, but it doesn't matter,
but shout out CSonic 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 thermocouple that we plug right into the
12 volt 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 zero degrees Celsius,
then we move to 20 degrees Celsius and finally 40 degrees. Everything is 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 degrees Celsius. 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 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 him up.
Each video has a template with parts of the voiceover 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 two to three 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 eye-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 videos, 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
LTTLabs.com. You'll even find some extra data there. You might even find this segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did on a 3,000 watt power supply
where you can see what our testing capabilities used to be.