A WATER COOLED POWER SUPPLY? ARE THEY NUTS??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,366 words · ~6 min read
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okay okay i know what you're thinking
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water plus a high amperage
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transformer that can literally blow up
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and take the rest of your computer hardware with it
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what could go wrong good idea or bad idea
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it's here and our goal today is to find
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out if the usual benefits of liquid cooling
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quieter cooler operation can also apply
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to a power supply
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so the first thing that caught our attention about this product
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aside from it being a water cooled power supply was the standard g1 quarter openings
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complete with bit power logo under the
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modular power connectors if they were trying to do a quality job
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they definitely found a solid partner so let's keep going then
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the internals do still have a fan making
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this a hybrid design similar to ASUS poseidon series of graphics cards
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but at the bottom of the main pcb there is
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also what appears to be a full length
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water block it doesn't seem to have any fins but it
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does have a flow meter interesting
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now the nda that we signed prevents us from
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tearing down our unit to show you exactly what that plate makes contact
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with but everything we can see from peering
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inside suggests that the internal heat sink array is pretty typical of a normal
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air cooled power supply and nothing on the fan side suggested
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that special design considerations had been made to accommodate transferring
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the heat to the water block so
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maybe the top mounted heat sinks run all
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the way through the pcb holes to the base of the block
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or maybe there's just a big thick thermal pad on the bottom of a
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completely normal power supply we actually don't know
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but none of this prevents us from answering our original question anyway
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so let's move on to find out if cooler and quieter can be
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achieved through fsp's method whatever it is
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we tested our unit in both air and liquid cooled mode and also compared it
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to one of the best air-cooled power supplies on the market the Corsair
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ax-1200i we ran each of them at idle
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two-thirds load and max capacity taking
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both thermal and acoustic measurements now
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one does not simply make a system consume
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1200 watts of power without some
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seriously overkill hardware so to achieve that we rigged up an x 299
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platform with the 16 core core i9 7960x
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overclocked to 4.2 gigahertz then we
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threw four overclocked titan x pascals onto the rig
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for some gp GPU rendering and ah
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beautiful just over 1400 watts from the wall so with some
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CPU voltage adjustments we got our system dialed in to about 1200 watts
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we then used cablemod extenders to be able to have the power supply in a
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separate room in order to control sound leakage
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first up then our air-cooled testing at idle
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both units remained silent neither of their fans turned on
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nothing to see here at two-thirds load the fsp fan spun up
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to about 800 RPM and our thermal imagery
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showed hot spots inside the unit at over 77 degrees celsius our extech sound
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meter read 44 decibels and i'd say subjectively it was about as loud as a
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d5 pump at 12 volts by comparison our Corsair axi reached
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only 700 RPM and was ever so slightly
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quieter at full 1200 watt load the fan spun up
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all the way to about 1200 RPM reaching 50 decibels and it was definitely
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audible over our 12 volt d5 pump making
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it the worst offender in a hypothetical system being pushed to the limits
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we saw two significant hot spots with our thermal camera and we even
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experienced some strange clicking and crackling noises
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for comparison our Corsair hit only 950
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RPM at 46 decibels making it significantly less noticeable over a d5
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not to mention that there was no crackling but it was noticeable over a
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d5 so maybe there is some improvement to be
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had from water cooling and besides this
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the hydro ptm plus 1200 watt was never meant to be air-cooled so
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let's throw this fish back in its natural habitat
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with a 240 millimeter liquid cooler hooked up we started with this power
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supply at two-thirds load and oh well
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that's kind of weird the fan turned on
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it did spin at a slightly lower RPM than
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when it was air-cooled but while our noise measurements did go down we
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actually didn't find that it made a noticeable difference compared to all
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air that midpoint heat spot was gone though
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at full bore the fan spun up to 900 ish
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RPM quite a bit lower than when it was air-cooled
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but it was still audible over a d5 with
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pretty much the same heat spots on the fan side
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so what happened here well without being
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able to take the unit apart to confirm our
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the block is only cooling the back side of the pcb theory
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it remains just that a theory but one
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that is somewhat corroborated by these renders that we found on fsp's website
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to be clear we did observe an improvement
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and it is possible that a liquid-cooled power supply could achieve better
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cooling and noise characteristics than an equivalent air-cooled one
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but the implementation on this one did
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leave a bit to be desired we had really hoped that the fan wouldn't be needed at
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all as long as the water cooling didn't fail
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so i would like to see a second attempt at this concept but maybe one that is
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more tightly integrated with the water block
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actually directly making contact with the heat producing parts of the power
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supply maybe then fsp would be onto something
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as it stands at the time of filming we actually don't know the price of this
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unit but we don't think it really matters anyway
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however much it is we really don't see the point of paying
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extra for it over another high quality high wattage power supply unless you
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just must have everything in your system liquid cooled
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