okay okay i know what you're thinking
water plus a high amperage
transformer that can literally blow up
and take the rest of your computer hardware with it
what could go wrong good idea or bad idea
it's here and our goal today is to find
out if the usual benefits of liquid cooling
quieter cooler operation can also apply
to a power supply
and we wouldn't be able to do it without tunnelbear tunnelbear makes it easy to
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so the first thing that caught our attention about this product
aside from it being a water cooled power supply was the standard g1 quarter openings
complete with bit power logo under the
modular power connectors if they were trying to do a quality job
they definitely found a solid partner so let's keep going then
the internals do still have a fan making
this a hybrid design similar to ASUS poseidon series of graphics cards
but at the bottom of the main pcb there is
also what appears to be a full length
water block it doesn't seem to have any fins but it
does have a flow meter interesting
now the nda that we signed prevents us from
tearing down our unit to show you exactly what that plate makes contact
with but everything we can see from peering
inside suggests that the internal heat sink array is pretty typical of a normal
air cooled power supply and nothing on the fan side suggested
that special design considerations had been made to accommodate transferring
the heat to the water block so
maybe the top mounted heat sinks run all
the way through the pcb holes to the base of the block
or maybe there's just a big thick thermal pad on the bottom of a
completely normal power supply we actually don't know
but none of this prevents us from answering our original question anyway
so let's move on to find out if cooler and quieter can be
achieved through fsp's method whatever it is
we tested our unit in both air and liquid cooled mode and also compared it
to one of the best air-cooled power supplies on the market the Corsair
ax-1200i we ran each of them at idle
two-thirds load and max capacity taking
both thermal and acoustic measurements now
one does not simply make a system consume
1200 watts of power without some
seriously overkill hardware so to achieve that we rigged up an x 299
platform with the 16 core core i9 7960x
overclocked to 4.2 gigahertz then we
threw four overclocked titan x pascals onto the rig
for some gp GPU rendering and ah
beautiful just over 1400 watts from the wall so with some
CPU voltage adjustments we got our system dialed in to about 1200 watts
we then used cablemod extenders to be able to have the power supply in a
separate room in order to control sound leakage
first up then our air-cooled testing at idle
both units remained silent neither of their fans turned on
nothing to see here at two-thirds load the fsp fan spun up
to about 800 RPM and our thermal imagery
showed hot spots inside the unit at over 77 degrees celsius our extech sound
meter read 44 decibels and i'd say subjectively it was about as loud as a
d5 pump at 12 volts by comparison our Corsair axi reached
only 700 RPM and was ever so slightly
quieter at full 1200 watt load the fan spun up
all the way to about 1200 RPM reaching 50 decibels and it was definitely
audible over our 12 volt d5 pump making
it the worst offender in a hypothetical system being pushed to the limits
we saw two significant hot spots with our thermal camera and we even
experienced some strange clicking and crackling noises
for comparison our Corsair hit only 950
RPM at 46 decibels making it significantly less noticeable over a d5
not to mention that there was no crackling but it was noticeable over a
d5 so maybe there is some improvement to be
had from water cooling and besides this
the hydro ptm plus 1200 watt was never meant to be air-cooled so
let's throw this fish back in its natural habitat
with a 240 millimeter liquid cooler hooked up we started with this power
supply at two-thirds load and oh well
that's kind of weird the fan turned on
it did spin at a slightly lower RPM than
when it was air-cooled but while our noise measurements did go down we
actually didn't find that it made a noticeable difference compared to all
air that midpoint heat spot was gone though
at full bore the fan spun up to 900 ish
RPM quite a bit lower than when it was air-cooled
but it was still audible over a d5 with
pretty much the same heat spots on the fan side
so what happened here well without being
able to take the unit apart to confirm our
the block is only cooling the back side of the pcb theory
it remains just that a theory but one
that is somewhat corroborated by these renders that we found on fsp's website
to be clear we did observe an improvement
and it is possible that a liquid-cooled power supply could achieve better
cooling and noise characteristics than an equivalent air-cooled one
but the implementation on this one did
leave a bit to be desired we had really hoped that the fan wouldn't be needed at
all as long as the water cooling didn't fail
so i would like to see a second attempt at this concept but maybe one that is
more tightly integrated with the water block
actually directly making contact with the heat producing parts of the power
supply maybe then fsp would be onto something
as it stands at the time of filming we actually don't know the price of this
unit but we don't think it really matters anyway
however much it is we really don't see the point of paying
extra for it over another high quality high wattage power supply unless you
just must have everything in your system liquid cooled
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