350-450W Roundup: 11 Cheap PSUs

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• Phaedrus2129 - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  That Sinan PSU is likely made by LongYi, a small and crappy PSU manufacturer in Guangdong, China. They make knock-off, cost-down designs based on reverse-engineered FSP and similar PSUs.

• Martin Kaffei - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  Thanks for these information. I guess there are more brands who use this manufacturer so it wasn't useless to test a German product.

• hasseb64 - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  Not many need more than 400W anymore, some think it's better to buy more now to be sure about future upgrades, but that view is should be reversed, total watt consumtion in builds going down for every generatio. I hope to see Platinum/Gold PSU from 200-300W in the future.
  
  Owning:
  460W GOLD ATX
  300W Gold ATX

• bryanl - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  "The Teapo models don't have the longest lifetime and lowest ESR; however, we've never detected a problem with Teapo in power supplies."
  
  Official ratings mean little when they're not honest, and while I haven't looked at Teapos in recent power supplies, they had very high failure rates in older CWT supplies, including those sold as Antec Smartpowers and Truepowers.

• Martin Kaffei - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  True, but Teapo has several products, you can't compare old models with current offerings. And some ratings are wrong for sure, but most manufacturers in this roundup used the same series and some of this companies have less than 1% failure rate according to retail shops.
  
  Not least you can't compare old PSUs with a modern 80Plus device. Temperatures are much lower today and switching frequency is different (which is why a low-ESR model would have been nice anyway). The ambient conditions are different. Teapo had problems on mainboards for the same reason. There are no bad or good components, just the right choice for a specific range of functions.

• bryanl - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  "True, but Teapo has several products, you can't compare old models with current offerings. And some ratings are wrong for sure, but most manufacturers in this roundup used the same series and some of this companies have less than 1% failure rate according to retail shops.
  
  Not least you can't compare old PSUs with a modern 80Plus device. Temperatures are much lower today and switching frequency is different (which is why a low-ESR model would have been nice anyway). The ambient conditions are different. Teapo had problems on mainboards for the same reason. There are no bad or good components, just the right choice for a specific range of functions. "
  
  These were mostly Teapo SC (green w/ gold or bronze writing), as new as 2010, a product still being made. What model Teapos were you thinking of?
  I believe these operated at frequencies of 60K-100K Hz and averaged temperatures of 50-65C. What are the operating conditions of the capacitors in the 80Plus power supplies?
  
  Power supplies will often continue to operate adequately even years after capacitor failure since some capacitors are redundant, including with motherboard capacitors, and most computers draw little power.

• Martin Kaffei - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link

  Even then it might be that Teapo changed some ingredients.
  
  However, let's assume that this is not the case. Current PSUs switch much faster than 100 KHz in order to reduce component size. E.g. 250 KHz is a common value these days, some of them are even faster. This is just one out of many different conditions:
  
  "averaged temperatures of 50-65C."
  No matter where--it will be lower, but where did you measure these temperatures? On which outputs or circuits did they fail? Did they all fail? Is there more or less space for cooling than in most PSUs in this review? How high was the average ambient temperature during operation? Do these PSUs have the comparable ripple values? How high was current? How high was load?
  
  This and even more is what we need to evaluate the position.
  
  For sure PSUs can operate without some of the output capacitors, but not for ever and ever. There are signs. In many cases you can hear noises when capacitors fail (or measure something). Moreoever I've never seen faulty Teapo capacitors in old FSP units and I used plenty of them for years.
  
  The source of such problems can be elsewhere. I had a PSU with an oscillating controller and all capacitors on 5VSB died. Does this mean the capacitors are the problem? No, after replacing a single resistor the controller was stable and the caps didn't fail again.

• bryanl - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link

  "RE: Capacitors in Rosewill power supply by Martin Kaffei on Friday, July 06, 2012 Even then it might be that Teapo changed some ingredients.
  
  However, let's assume that this is not the case. Current PSUs switch much faster than 100 KHz in order to reduce component size. E.g. 250 KHz is a common value these days, some of them are even faster. This is just one out of many different conditions:
  
  "averaged temperatures of 50-65C."
  No matter where--it will be lower, but where did you measure these temperatures? On which outputs or circuits did they fail? Did they all fail? Is there more or less space for cooling than in most PSUs in this review? How high was the average ambient temperature during operation? Do these PSUs have the comparable ripple values? How high was current? How high was load?
  
  This and even more is what we need to evaluate the position.
  
  For sure PSUs can operate without some of the output capacitors, but not for ever and ever. There are signs. In many cases you can hear noises when capacitors fail (or measure something). Moreoever I've never seen faulty Teapo capacitors in old FSP units and I used plenty of them for years.
  
  The source of such problems can be elsewhere. I had a PSU with an oscillating controller and all capacitors on 5VSB died. Does this mean the capacitors are the problem? No, after replacing a single resistor the controller was stable and the caps didn't fail again. "
  
  250 KHz has long been common for motherboards, but which PSUs oscillate near that frequency? I wasn't able to find anything operating above approximately 150 KHz at websites that presented oscillographs (Jonnyguru.com, Hardwaresecrets.com) where the fundamental could be identified. Temperature readings were taken with direct contact thermistors or thermocouples touching the metal bodies of the output capacitors while the PSUs operated motherboards without high performance video cards.
  
  In well designed power supplies, few components fail nearly as much as capacitors, and there's a fairly common +5VSB circuit made of 2 discrete transistors that overvolts when it fails, almost always due to a bad capacitor, often 1-2 10V, 1000uF Teapo SCs.

• Bambooz - Sunday, May 5, 2013 - link

  Forget about Teapo. C(r)apxon is the biggest epidemic right now. They're in basically every Fortron and Fortron based PSU (Bequiet anyone?)
  
  If you have a PSU with Crapxon on the secondary side it's almost guaranteed it won't make it to it's 2nd birthday without the crapxons puking their guts out and in turn, sh*tloads of ripple (I've had client computers where shitty cheap FSP OEM PSUs killed HDDs due to their caps failing)
  
  Instability, whining and sometimes (for example Bequiet E5 series and FSP Bluestorm I & II) power-up problems (because of bad caps on the 5VSB circuitry) are pretty much the norm with these..
  
  No matter how good fortrons may sound.. avoid them at all costs unless you can recap them BEFORE putting them into service.

• Onus - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link

  I too am interested in lower-wattage units, so this article was a good read. I've been more impressed with FSP's recent offerings. The way the Raider's efficiency quickly ramped up was excellent. Maybe not down to the Picos, I am also interested in physically smaller units, like TFX and SFX models. Seasonic and FSP have some good ones there.
  
  My "goto" PSU in budget builds for years has been the Antec EA-380D. I've never had one fail. I buy Seasonic or Antec for my own systems, although I'd consider FSP, Corsair, or Enermax also.
  If you go through the assortment of reviews Gabrial Torres at HardwareSecrets has done on CM PSUs, you will understand why I call them "Crappermaster." The "Extreme ..." lines in particular are near-junk, most with liar-labels and/or claimed protection circuits actually missing. That's consumer fraud. One of my favorite comments though comes from a HardOCP review, in which the GX650 was summarized as a "polished turd in a box." Friends don't let friends buy Crappermaster (even their good stuff, because that is supporting a dishonest business).