if building your own gaming PC is better than buying a stuffy pre-built one then
why not build your own power supply instead of buying a stuffy pre-built one
performance availability compatibility safety okay all right Buzz kills but it
is absolutely possible with off-the-shelf components and a can do
attitude you don't even have to assemble that much Pico power supply modules like
this one used to be expensive hard to find but these days you can get ones
that claim to handle up to a mid-tier gaming PC for as little as 20 to 30
us of course you will need some additional bits but by the time we were
finished and this really is it we had a
power supply for under $40 that not only
Powers the gaming PC that you're looking at right here but even survived a trip
to the lab with what I would call acceptable results so why don't people
do this all the time well let me put it
this way when seic heard we were going to attempt this they volunteered to
sponsor the video as a demonstration of their confidence that nothing we show
you today is going to harm their sales all right seic challenge
accepted let's lay out our plan starting with a run down of these things we call
them PCO psus but in a world first
somehow the AliExpress description might be more appropriate than our generally
accepted term because this is not a power supply at least not in the way
that we'd think of it it's got some power supply characteristics like it's
24 pin ATX connector that goes into your motherboard it's step down converters
for 3.3 and 5vt as well as a few small
capacitors for smoothing but what it LAX
is any way of converting your household AC to the DC power that your electronics
absolutely need in order to function that is the part of your traditional
power supply that realistically is doing the heavy lifting and the 12vt power
brick that you need in order to make one of these fully functional pretty much
wipes out any potential savings from a DIY unit at least it would if we had to
buy one 12volt power is used for all kinds of things like smart lighting
accessory charging and even to power small household appliances the issue
that we run into is that these devices use very small amounts of it and desktop
computers need a lot now one option we
did legitimately consider was combining
multiple basic power bricks I mean the
450 W version of our Pico PSU here
actually has two barrel plugs for two inputs so if two is good then more must
be be better right well
wrongish the thing is we only really
considered this to illustrate why it usually isn't a great idea if both power
supplies are the same it's not the worst thing but even two units of the same
model might have slightly different output voltages which can lead to back
feeding voltage drops or unexpected side effects and if the two power supplies
are rated for very different output amperages one could end up overloaded
while the other is underloaded our next brilliant idea was to look for the
cheapest high current 12volt power supply we could find this one is
typically used for big LED arrays and can do up to 240 or 250 Watts depending
on how you do the math let's see how it goes we do still have some other ideas
to get over the finish line here but before we do let's talk about what differentiates a quality PC power supply
like this one from our sponsor cic from a bottom of the barrel unit like this
one a quick word of Warning by the way guys while our LTT screwdriver LTT
store.com is a highquality screwdriver it does nothing to protect you from the
dangers of opening a power supply and you should not be doing this yourself
unless you are a professional and positive that you know how to avoid
electrocuting yourself and with that done I think it's pretty apparent which
one is better even if you have no idea what any of this stuff does but for the
sake of Education let's explain it filtering capacitors smooth out the
delivery of power without them a sudden Spike or drop in voltage recurrent can
cause some big issues on cic these are
large and plentiful made by nipon chemicon one of the top brands of
Japanese caps if you were to try to reverse engineer this unit this bad boy
cap right here would cost you like $6 on its own over here we've got a handful of
electrolytic caps from the likes of Chong X and DK both of which have some
pretty stellar reviews online voltage regulation modules you
know them you love them they ensure that your components get exact the voltages
they need on the seic unit they're attached to a 90° daughter board with a
big Toral coil for each different voltage on our no name there are none
vrm Duties are handled on our picco unit with RB boards using what appears to be
a cloned Texas instrument switching regulator along with these 4.7
microhenry inductor coils moving on to rectifiers these are usually just a
series of diodes that turn AC into DC on
our cic unit they're in fan made attached to nice big heat sinks with a
fan right above them meanwhile on our no-name power supply they're made by
Fairchild and vishe general semiconductor both actually respectable
Brands this time assuming they're genuine but in terms of cooling um
they're just what thermal padded to the
outside of the chassis on the subject of cooling seic has a followup to this unit
that has some cool innovations that I'm going to talk about later first I want
to show you how we can complete our mission of our near zero budget power
supply and if you guessed it was Facebook Marketplace to the rescue
you're right now anyone Savvy enough to
remove the power supply from their electronic Gizmo is going to know that
it's worth something on its own so save yourself some trouble don't search for
12volt power supply or power supply for thing X search for broken thing x a for
parts gaming laptop or Mini PC is a really good start some of them use
proprietary plugs and often get discarded plugs that can just be cut off
to get access to the good juicy wires with that said most laptop bricks these
days are actually 20 volt so we would need to Buck the power down to 12 which
requires additional parts and labor that we don't want to deal with fortunately
there are other options game consoles typically hit their cheapest point when
they're two generations old meaning that Wiis PS3s and Xbox 360s are cheap and
plentiful right now now the 360 went through a ton of revisions with the
first unit being both the most power hungry and the most likely to fail so a
203 watt brick from a red ringed Xbox could be a great candidate for our use
case except that the proprietary connector is a bit more of a hassle than
usual in this case and there's no reason to deal with that when there's a better
alternative the fat PS3 now there were
probably more versions of the PS3 than most people realize of the 120 volt
models there were 19 different power supplies made by five different
companies ranging from 160 Watts all the way up to a whopping
399 watts of them the most powerful four
all came from fat PS3s manufactured between 2006 and 2008 with these codes
in their part numbers now models A and B are worth their weight in gold on
account of their PS2 backwards compatibility but the other three can be
found for about 20 bucks fairly easily or even for free if they're broken the
best thing about these early model PS3 power supplies though is that they
attach to the motherboard with cylindrical plugs that perfectly fit a
standard 4mm banana plug the kind that you might find on consumer audio
equipment just make sure that if your banana plug has a metal housing though
that it is completely covered so that you don't accidentally start a fire
while you're digging through the trash of your local stereo store for banana plugs by the way be sure to grab some 12
gauge stereo wire as it will work perfectly for carrying this much current
any smaller though and yeah you're going to be back in fire bill then we jumper
pins one and five on this little white connector right here that's the
equivalent of jumpering the green and black wires on an ATX power supply plug
in our salvaged AC socket here and I
think it's time to power it on let's see what
happens and there we have it not only is
it working we're running cyberpunk 2077
I mean on a 4060 so you know it doesn't look amazing but it's running the whole
system is even shockingly quiet does does this PS3 power supply even have a
fan in it no oh is that bad yes ah okay
so you might want to account for another couple of dollars in your $40 budget if
you wanted to replicate something like this but I think there is one more
question remaining and that is whether you would even want to why don't we send
this thing over to the Labs to test and this time I'm taking off your cute
little test is 275 watt sticker that was
to ensure that it survived the first time around let's take it all the way to
the limit when we first gave this to Lucas from the Labs team for testing we
asked him to treat it like a 275 wat power supply since that's all we really
needed for our PC that increased its odds of survival but probably also
negatively impacted its efficiency numbers so let's try that again and it's
rated 384 watts of output so it it died
yeah well it did manage to be a little
bit more efficient but at the cost of
the power supply as a whole in conclusion does it work yes um is it
worth it I'll let you be the judge of that but if you decide that this looks
like a lot of hassle for not a lot of benefit why don't you check out our
sponsor seic their upcoming focus and core power supplies moved several of the
heat generating components onto a dedicated daughter board that includes a
perforated copper ground plane essentially acting as a heat sink within
the PCB itself this allows them to dissipate more heat using less space and
cic told us that this new optis sync design as they call it will be eight
times more efficient at conducting heat and offer an increase in both
performance and reliability long term and because optis sync is also cheaper
to produce seic is launching the next generation of focus units at $10 less
than the MSRP of the current V3 models you can expect them to show up sometime
late this year and we're going to have a link to them down below where you can
learn more if you guys enjoyed this video why not check out the time seic
made a power supply that put the buck converters and connectors into a
separate chassis it was pretty wild and I kind of wish it caught on