Antec Digital Power Supply Tester Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
930 words · ~4 min read
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so today I'm having a look at a pretty cool product from antech these kinds of
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devices have been on the market for a number of years but this one's got all
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the latest upto-date features and everything so this is the antech digital
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PC power tester so I have conveniently a
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PC next to me I'm going to go ahead and shut it down so this is just a quick
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quick and dirty way to find out if your power supply is functioning as intended
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so you know I hate plastic clam shells
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that have these these metal grommets through them it's so hard to
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open have to like heave on them just to get plastic
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to break okay so let's see what we have inside here to start with besides
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dropping the digital tester okay so now I can't even get the
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paper off without ripping it that's too bad that's okay all right so there's no
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documentation they basically expect you to know how it works here let's see is
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this test your ATX power supply quickly
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easily and accurately with anex digital PC power Tester the simple tool for
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checking the health of your atx2 or 24 pin power supply diagnose the problem
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and save time on troubleshooting so a lot of the time PC trouble can be caused
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by any number of things and you have no way of knowing exactly what's causing
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the issue so this allows you to test a 20 pin connector it allows you to
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test a four pin or8 pin um CPU connector
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six pin PCI Express and four pin floppy and then I'm going to go ahead and guess
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that in here is a Molex no what is that oh that's SATA
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okay so there's SATA on that side and then in here I'm going to guess this is
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a MOX MOX connector okay so why don't we plug this into the power supply that we
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already know is functioning so that makes things that makes life a little
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bit easier here let's just unplug that from the classified board that I've got
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on my test bench here okay so we plug PL
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that in just like that we got the four pins see you can see the 20 and four
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pins that's lined up there look at
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that so it gets the it sets the power supply running so you can see the fan is
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now spinning in the power supply even though I haven't powered it on because
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it actually shorts out the
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um uh the pins required to get it going
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okay there that was awkward so it gives us readouts of the 5vt rail 12v 1 3.3
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Vol - 12 vol 12v 2 now this is a single rail power
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supply so obviously that rail 12v 2 is
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not functioning 5 volb and
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then I don't actually know okay so let's see what else we got let's plug in the
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six pin and see if it shows us anything
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different oh okay so 12vt 2 I guess it's just it will read off another connector
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you can see that the two readings are exactly the same so that's um something
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that would indicate to us that it is a single rail power supply you know what let's try something completely different
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here give me like just bear with me one moment I'm going to plug this back into
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the motherboard and I want to try this while the system's running and see if it
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actually gives us any any readout i' I've never used one of these before
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because I usually have just like another power supply on hand that I can test
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with so why don't we just plug that all that stuff back in let's power up the
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system and then I'm going to go ahead and grab another modular cable for this
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power supply I'm going to grab a SATA cable okay plug that into the uh fractal
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design power supply I got here okay SATA
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was on this side and let's just plug this in and see what happens so I think
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it goes this way yeah I think it goes
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that way okay so it just oh this is different
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so it gives us a little indicator light so when you don't actually plug in the
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24 pin it just shows you yes all rails are actually functioning as intended so
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I'm guessing it would do the same thing if we plugged in say for example
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a PCI Express connector so let's try that too PCI Express plug in the modular
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cable sorry this is taking so long I wasn't expecting to do this aspect of
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the test but since we're here we have
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nowhere important to be why don't we just do it okay so this goes in this way
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and that tells us a lot less
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so it looks like the these connectors only work if you've actually got the 24
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pin connector in whereas the Molex and SATA connectors which are on the sides
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of the unit give you more of an indicator uh more of an indication of
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whether you've got the correct power being provided so thanks for checking out my unboxing and quick guide on the
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antech digital power supply tester