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if building your own gaming PC is better than buying a stuffy pre-built one then

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why not build your own power supply instead of buying a stuffy pre-built one

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performance availability compatibility safety okay all right Buzz kills but it

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is absolutely possible with off-the-shelf components and a can do

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attitude you don't even have to assemble that much Pico power supply modules like

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this one used to be expensive hard to find but these days you can get ones

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that claim to handle up to a mid-tier gaming PC for as little as 20 to 30

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us of course you will need some additional bits but by the time we were

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finished and this really is it we had a

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power supply for under $40 that not only

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Powers the gaming PC that you're looking at right here but even survived a trip

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to the lab with what I would call acceptable results so why don't people

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do this all the time well let me put it

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this way when seic heard we were going to attempt this they volunteered to

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sponsor the video as a demonstration of their confidence that nothing we show

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you today is going to harm their sales all right seic challenge

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accepted let's lay out our plan starting with a run down of these things we call

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them PCO psus but in a world first

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somehow the AliExpress description might be more appropriate than our generally

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accepted term because this is not a power supply at least not in the way

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that we'd think of it it's got some power supply characteristics like it's

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24 pin ATX connector that goes into your motherboard it's step down converters

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for 3.3 and 5vt as well as a few small

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capacitors for smoothing but what it LAX

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is any way of converting your household AC to the DC power that your electronics

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absolutely need in order to function that is the part of your traditional

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power supply that realistically is doing the heavy lifting and the 12vt power

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brick that you need in order to make one of these fully functional pretty much

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wipes out any potential savings from a DIY unit at least it would if we had to

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buy one 12volt power is used for all kinds of things like smart lighting

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accessory charging and even to power small household appliances the issue

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that we run into is that these devices use very small amounts of it and desktop

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computers need a lot now one option we

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did legitimately consider was combining

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multiple basic power bricks I mean the

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450 W version of our Pico PSU here

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actually has two barrel plugs for two inputs so if two is good then more must

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be be better right well

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wrongish the thing is we only really

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considered this to illustrate why it usually isn't a great idea if both power

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supplies are the same it's not the worst thing but even two units of the same

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model might have slightly different output voltages which can lead to back

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feeding voltage drops or unexpected side effects and if the two power supplies

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are rated for very different output amperages one could end up overloaded

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while the other is underloaded our next brilliant idea was to look for the

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cheapest high current 12volt power supply we could find this one is

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typically used for big LED arrays and can do up to 240 or 250 Watts depending

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on how you do the math let's see how it goes we do still have some other ideas

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to get over the finish line here but before we do let's talk about what differentiates a quality PC power supply

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like this one from our sponsor cic from a bottom of the barrel unit like this

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one a quick word of Warning by the way guys while our LTT screwdriver LTT

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store.com is a highquality screwdriver it does nothing to protect you from the

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dangers of opening a power supply and you should not be doing this yourself

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unless you are a professional and positive that you know how to avoid

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electrocuting yourself and with that done I think it's pretty apparent which

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one is better even if you have no idea what any of this stuff does but for the

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sake of Education let's explain it filtering capacitors smooth out the

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delivery of power without them a sudden Spike or drop in voltage recurrent can

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cause some big issues on cic these are

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large and plentiful made by nipon chemicon one of the top brands of

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Japanese caps if you were to try to reverse engineer this unit this bad boy

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cap right here would cost you like $6 on its own over here we've got a handful of

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electrolytic caps from the likes of Chong X and DK both of which have some

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pretty stellar reviews online voltage regulation modules you

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know them you love them they ensure that your components get exact the voltages

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they need on the seic unit they're attached to a 90° daughter board with a

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big Toral coil for each different voltage on our no name there are none

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vrm Duties are handled on our picco unit with RB boards using what appears to be

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a cloned Texas instrument switching regulator along with these 4.7

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microhenry inductor coils moving on to rectifiers these are usually just a

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series of diodes that turn AC into DC on

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our cic unit they're in fan made attached to nice big heat sinks with a

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fan right above them meanwhile on our no-name power supply they're made by

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Fairchild and vishe general semiconductor both actually respectable

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Brands this time assuming they're genuine but in terms of cooling um

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they're just what thermal padded to the

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outside of the chassis on the subject of cooling seic has a followup to this unit

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that has some cool innovations that I'm going to talk about later first I want

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to show you how we can complete our mission of our near zero budget power

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supply and if you guessed it was Facebook Marketplace to the rescue

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you're right now anyone Savvy enough to

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remove the power supply from their electronic Gizmo is going to know that

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it's worth something on its own so save yourself some trouble don't search for

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12volt power supply or power supply for thing X search for broken thing x a for

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parts gaming laptop or Mini PC is a really good start some of them use

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proprietary plugs and often get discarded plugs that can just be cut off

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to get access to the good juicy wires with that said most laptop bricks these

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days are actually 20 volt so we would need to Buck the power down to 12 which

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requires additional parts and labor that we don't want to deal with fortunately

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there are other options game consoles typically hit their cheapest point when

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they're two generations old meaning that Wiis PS3s and Xbox 360s are cheap and

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plentiful right now now the 360 went through a ton of revisions with the

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first unit being both the most power hungry and the most likely to fail so a

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203 watt brick from a red ringed Xbox could be a great candidate for our use

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case except that the proprietary connector is a bit more of a hassle than

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usual in this case and there's no reason to deal with that when there's a better

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alternative the fat PS3 now there were

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probably more versions of the PS3 than most people realize of the 120 volt

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models there were 19 different power supplies made by five different

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companies ranging from 160 Watts all the way up to a whopping

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399 watts of them the most powerful four

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all came from fat PS3s manufactured between 2006 and 2008 with these codes

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in their part numbers now models A and B are worth their weight in gold on

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account of their PS2 backwards compatibility but the other three can be

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found for about 20 bucks fairly easily or even for free if they're broken the

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best thing about these early model PS3 power supplies though is that they

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attach to the motherboard with cylindrical plugs that perfectly fit a

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standard 4mm banana plug the kind that you might find on consumer audio

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equipment just make sure that if your banana plug has a metal housing though

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that it is completely covered so that you don't accidentally start a fire

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while you're digging through the trash of your local stereo store for banana plugs by the way be sure to grab some 12

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gauge stereo wire as it will work perfectly for carrying this much current

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any smaller though and yeah you're going to be back in fire bill then we jumper

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pins one and five on this little white connector right here that's the

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equivalent of jumpering the green and black wires on an ATX power supply plug

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in our salvaged AC socket here and I

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think it's time to power it on let's see what

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happens and there we have it not only is

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it working we're running cyberpunk 2077

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I mean on a 4060 so you know it doesn't look amazing but it's running the whole

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system is even shockingly quiet does does this PS3 power supply even have a

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fan in it no oh is that bad yes ah okay

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so you might want to account for another couple of dollars in your $40 budget if

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you wanted to replicate something like this but I think there is one more

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question remaining and that is whether you would even want to why don't we send

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this thing over to the Labs to test and this time I'm taking off your cute

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little test is 275 watt sticker that was

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to ensure that it survived the first time around let's take it all the way to

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the limit when we first gave this to Lucas from the Labs team for testing we

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asked him to treat it like a 275 wat power supply since that's all we really

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needed for our PC that increased its odds of survival but probably also

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negatively impacted its efficiency numbers so let's try that again and it's

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rated 384 watts of output so it it died

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yeah well it did manage to be a little

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bit more efficient but at the cost of

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the power supply as a whole in conclusion does it work yes um is it

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worth it I'll let you be the judge of that but if you decide that this looks

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like a lot of hassle for not a lot of benefit why don't you check out our

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sponsor seic their upcoming focus and core power supplies moved several of the

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heat generating components onto a dedicated daughter board that includes a

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perforated copper ground plane essentially acting as a heat sink within

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the PCB itself this allows them to dissipate more heat using less space and

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cic told us that this new optis sync design as they call it will be eight

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times more efficient at conducting heat and offer an increase in both

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performance and reliability long term and because optis sync is also cheaper

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to produce seic is launching the next generation of focus units at $10 less

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than the MSRP of the current V3 models you can expect them to show up sometime

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late this year and we're going to have a link to them down below where you can

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learn more if you guys enjoyed this video why not check out the time seic

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made a power supply that put the buck converters and connectors into a

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separate chassis it was pretty wild and I kind of wish it caught on