We're here at Cooler Master's booth at CES 2024,
and the amount of engineering prowess that they have on display here is not what I was expecting at all.
Their new X series of power supplies are just mind-bogglingly cool.
This thing right here, 1,100 watts and completely fanless.
Look at this, absolutely silent.
And if you put a fan on it, it can go up to 2,800 watts.
Of course, you can't do it in North America, your breakers would just blow,
but if you're in Europe, you absolutely can't. This thing is actually bonkers.
Now, there's two things that you need to have a fanless power supply.
First of all, you just need cooling. Cooler Master can do that, that's not too hard.
And also it needs to just be incredibly efficient,
which is the particularly difficult part. Although first, let's just have a little talk
about the cooling. The first way to dissipate heat is pretty simple.
You stick a big old heat sink on top of your components and yeah, that just gets the heat away,
but they've gone one step further than that. And the whole bottom of this power supply case
is one great big heat sink. So your main transformer that goes from your 400 volt
down to 12 is right over top of this cold plate.
And they have four heat pipes that are going to take that heat and spread it all across this extruded piece
of aluminum right here. As cooling solution is pretty sick,
but when we look at the actual width, they've got the efficiency so great in this,
it is incredible. Just like this, incredible segue to our sponsor.
In the past though, we have seen fanless power supplies, but they've capped out at around 750 watts.
And how Cooler Master was able to take this up to that 1100 was with the components in here.
So let's go from the wall to your computer
and show you it compared to just sort of like a normal quite high end power supply.
The first bit of your power supply is when your dirty wall
power comes in right here and needs to be cleaned up by your power factor correction.
Now, if this is not done properly, your voltage and your current might be a little bit out of phase
or the noise that's coming from your wall will cause that to be out of phase
and it can be very inefficient. Now, in a normal power supply,
you might have your medium flux chokes and those are pretty good,
but it's not like they're very fancy high flux chokes
that they've got in this one. The main thing is just that the materials
are quite expensive in these ones right here and it makes them able to really, really get that noise down.
The next step is to take your AC input and change it over to DC using a bridge diode.
Well, normally you would use a bridge diode, but what they are using are MOSFETs
for even more efficiency at that step. Next, we want to step up the voltage to 380 volts.
Now, this is normally accomplished with a single rail in the X series, they're using two rails.
This allows you to have less switching losses and just higher efficiency, which also means less heat.
From there, what we have to do is take our 380 volts
and chop it up into AC so that we can take it down to 12 volts using a transformer.
Now, this is done using MOSFETs, but the problem that they ran into
is that they are switching their MOSFETs so fast
that if they were to use normal traditional ones or you have like a screw that attaches it to your heat sink,
you're having problems with the corona effect and then if that happens, your MOSFET explodes, bad time.
Because your power supply exploding is fairly undesirable,
they had to work with their manufacturer to do a special high temperature press
so that their MOSFETs could be attached to the heat sink here
without using any screws, look at that.
Because 380 volts going to your CPU is undesirable,
we have to step it down with this transformer to the 12 volts that you need.
This is typically done with your transformer and that's where a lot of the switching losses
will occur in your power supply. They now have a multi-layer transformer
to help reduce those losses and reduce that heat, even though this is the hottest component in the whole thing.
Now, typically after the transformer, you have a full analog signal,
but in this they have an MCU that turns it into a digital signal
and through the PM bus that's right here, it's able to communicate with the server or your computer
so it knows exactly sort of what the power supply is doing,
what the server is doing, they can communicate together for the maximum efficiency.
Now we have our 12 volts that is going to power most of the stuff in your computer,
but because 12 volt only hasn't caught on for some stupid reason,
we have to also get 3.3 and 5 volt. Now this is done quite similarly to how you would do it
in a traditional power supply, only difference is just components are bigger and better,
more efficiency, less heat. Now with all of that, we were able to get our 1100 watts out of this
completely silently, completely fanlessly, and it has a platinum efficiency rating to boot.
A couple more interesting things about this power supply, we have a USB protocol right here,
which just allows you to have some software to see how the power supply is doing,
how everything's running, that sort of stuff. Our PM bus, which we already talked about
for servers and industrial things, and also a little fan output.
This is just for, if you don't have maybe enough fan outputs on your motherboard,
you can have your fans controlled by the power supply load directly from here.
You guys won't be shocked to know that all of that technology that they've cramped in here
will be coming at a price. This is expected to be somewhere between 650 and $700
when it launches later this month. You're looking for something a little bit smaller though,
they have their VSFX platinum. Now in the US and spots with 110 voltage,
it's going to be 1100 watts, but if you're fortunate to be somewhere that has 240 volt,
you can get 1300 watts in a power supply of this size.
That is absolutely bonkers. Like just for context,
this right here is a typical ATX power supply.
This thing's 1300 watts.
I feel like we've already nerded out enough in this, so I'm not going to go into the details
of how they achieved that, but the gist of it is buy very high quality components,
get very high quality power supply. One final thing that's nice are their new cables.
It's just a very simple right angle connector
into three guys so that you don't accidentally know not completely the connection and burn your house down.
And it's just going to be awesome for when you're in like a really small computer
and you just can't fit something like this in there.
Just like I can't fit any more really technical information in this video.
If you guys are still around, thank you so much for watching. This was absolutely brain breaking.
Hit like, get subscribed and just have a fantastic old day.
See you later.