2003 Power Supply Roundup Part II: Better Faster Cheaper
by Kristopher Kubicki on July 31, 2003 1:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
An alarming trend we noticed with our roundup was that power supplies with fan controls on the rear of the unit have problems keeping tight tolerances. We looked into the problem a little more and noticed that while the components on the inside of the unit were of good quality, the fan control switches themselves were not.
Often the worst cases were fan control power supplies with often poor locking mechanisms. For example, the TTGI power supplies sometimes let the control switch slip slightly, resulting in a switch that rested half way between “high” and “low”. As a result, the poor contact produced incredibly awful ripple tests as demonstrated below.
Fan Control out of Place Voltages
|
|
+12V Low |
+12V High |
|
Kingwin KWI-450WABK |
11.830 |
12.225 |
|
TTGI/SuperFlower 520SS 4Fan |
11.820 |
12.240 |
|
TTGI/SuperFlower 420SS |
11.850 |
12.225 |
|
TTGI/SuperFlower 350SS |
11.875 |
12.305 |
|
Vantec Ion 400W |
11.780 |
12.005 |
|
Vantec Stealth 520W |
11.750 |
12.010 |
Edit:Although these measurements do not show the +12V rail out of specification from the ATX12V 1.2 document, they are much different from the measurements obtained on the previous page. This change warrants some attention, since if unchecked, poor signals will damage your hardware. Newer motherboards attempt to purify signals coming on the motherboard to prevent catastrophic failure, but voltages over the rails not feeding to the motherboard are very susceptible to failure (this puts a video card or hard drive in serious jeopardy).
After contacting manufacturers with this information, we got confirmation from companies stating that they planned on dropping the fan control from their power supplies. Vantec told us that dropping this controller actually lowers their cost significantly, and the savings would be then relayed to the consumer. Consider how much you actually use the fan control on your power supply (if you have one). Our opinion is that the tradeoff will be well worth it.
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Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
1. No amp measurements were listed, a serious deficiency because without them there is no way to know how well each PS met its amp specs, and many brands are known to fall short.2. No overload testing results for shorts, excessive power draw, excessive temperature.
3. Ripple is not just slow voltage variation also short term variation, such as for each AC cycle (60 Hz for the incoming AC, about 60,000 Hz for the output DC). I would have liked to see how the latter correlated with the memory noise test results.
4. I hope you were careful when you tested the PS heatsink temperatures because some heatsinks are live with high voltage.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Well for the observent people who can differentiate between orange and blue, its not an issue. Also waiting a full second before clicking it reveals the location on both the bottom left and the mouse cursor. but i can see how it does get annoying.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
yeah those in page advertisements are REALLY annoying...those have got to go. i never know when i'm going to link to another anandtech article or to an ad...i guess that's the point but it's still unacceptableAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I would like to see the review include a Heroichi Electronic power supply, I hear they are very good but I haven't used one.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Some of your "In Page Advertising" links seem to be missing closing links tags or something so that it results in having a <link> in the middle or end of a sentence. Ex. "We had a lot of troubles with Vantec’s last power supply, the Stealth. We found an error in the production label<link>, which quickly led to a change in all the labeling on all Stealth power supplies."KristopherKubicki - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
#3 and #4, thank you for spotting these errors. I have updated and fixed them.Cheers,
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I hope the ripple for the PC Power & Cooling 3V wasn't 2.295.. Possibly 3.296??? 1 volt drop is unacceptable.Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
The REAL price of the pc power&coolinghttp://www.directron.com/pcpower.htmlAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
a little more content per page in some cases would be nice too......but good to see content on the site at all...and seemingly more regularly too...
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
woah guys, the tables need some work...