Gadgetory

hey everyone I am here with the founder of Johnny guru currently at Corsair what do you do at core sir I am the director of power supply R&D so we're gonna be talking about power supplies of course and this I actually preempts something pretty big for us that gamers Nexus we're gonna start testing power supplies pretty soon I've received some training from mr. John Jareau you know now just enough to be dangerous yeah that's right and so the goal here is to talk about why should you care about power supply reviews there aren't a lot of them on YouTube at least not ones that go into depth with testing equipment yep so we need to talk about why power supplies matter before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our temperatures Thermal Grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below so the whole reason I got into power supplies even though I'm not an electrical engineer you know I have a computer background first software than hardware is because of the lack of knowledge of what is in this mysterious black box right you know so I I got my hands on a load test or similar to this many years ago because what I found out was a lot of power supplies weren't able to do what they said they could do when you look at the label the power supply and a lot of what the power supply could do was also out of spec for what Intel expects your power supplies to do and of course this goes back to like 15 years ago when you know a power supply that had 150 millivolts a rip on the 12 volt rail was not uncommon yeah if you're paying like $20 for a 500 watt power supply so yeah so I got myself a low tester like this and started loading up power supplies to whatever the label said and blew quite a few of them up fewer now than before because I think everybody is now you know learning that there's a lot of garbage out there so it's it's been quite a quite a fun quite a fun journey you know I mean we were talking about if we kind of give everyone a a spectacle to start with yeah like catastrophic failure is always a fun yes yes so on a power spike catastrophic leaf and you read online about a really good example is for example the 24-pin if you load say four GPUs into a motherboard right and you start pushing 75 watts to all the PCIe slots yeah something you can melt the cables or some yeah that's that's one of their most recent catastrophic failures that we see especially with all the cryptocurrency mining is melted pins because PSUs are pushing graphics cards running full load 24/7 and eventually you know that he built builds up and those connectors start to melt right they're just not engineered to do that in most cases I mean the power supplies can do it but the problem is the cables commonsense you would think would dictate that you would want to spread those loads up across multiple cables and connectors but unfortunate there's quite a few people in there they're like I just want this to be neat clean I got one cable that's got six connectors on it let's use that and that's when you run into problems yeah yeah so that's that's one type power supplies can go pop if yeah that's that's the really dramatic ones that I usually wish I have cameras running all the time on me 24/7 yeah and you never get used to it either a power supply pops you will jump you could be doing this for 20 years doesn't matter every engineer in here power supply blows up right through the roof and and it's it's really spectacular when you do see it because even in the housing through the grille you're gonna see those sparks shoot through like the fan grille and stuff and typically that's because you have MOSFETs that are overloaded where they're on the PFC the input voltage is just too low so you're pushing more current through it can't handle it it blows up or on the DC side you're just pushing too much power through it and it blows up and again spectacular flash of light and a very loud bang all right everybody in the room you know there are skips a beat yeah and you take a early lunch yeah right yeah so what about for overclocking something we do a lot of run into things where for example it's not uncommon to push 50 or 60 amps into a video card right hopefully over multiple PCIe K right of course one or something right so when you're talking about a situation like over clocking in exiting spec and you're dealing with a high amount of current through a cable what kinds of points of failure do you see there I mean wire gauge yeah right yeah wire gauge is really really important I mean we make sure we specify wire gauge based on use case you know but coppers expensive right so you'll find a lot of power supplies out there were the wire gauges and thick enough to support sustained loads of a high-end graphics card so some of the some of the negative feedback from that is that you know obviously if the gauge is thinner you're building up resistance the voltage drops you know and and it's just everything just goes haywire all right you know the car doesn't get enough power your efficiency drops the power supply actually will potentially overload even because it's trying to push power to feed a card that's not getting as much power as it needs because there's just too much resistance in this locate wire so it's just that that's something that's really often overlooked but it can really cause a lot of problems but you know it's and again it's this kind of the same problem as when you'd load too many cards or too many riser cards in the case and cryptocurrency mining you know onto a single cable you know it's too much power it's being fed into a single wire at the power supply and that's just gonna cause so much resistance that heat builds up I've measured like a hundred and sixty degrees Celsius at a single connector pin and then yeah you it's no wonder you start seeing black plastic just off the power supply yeah yeah and that alone is once we get into power supply testing fully that's something I want to explore because we see a lot of I get tweets from people all the time where we'll see like melted connectors to riser cards yeah and it's really not a big question why it melted right it's surprising that people actually are surprised that they melted times when they do and and you and you know it's funny is up until recently when cryptocurrency mining became so big for everyone you know everybody wants to you know get on board that train that I've really learned a lot about the UL 94 V flammability rating of plastic and the additives that are required to put into the plastic so it just melts it doesn't burst into flames right that's yeah every day is a learning experience right so what let's talk about this thing behind us yeah yeah so we have two units we've got a power supply over there it's a corsair HX 850 that's currently hooked up to this which is an sm 8800 sun/moon SM 8800 yep the auxiliary loads called an SM 22 sorry 220 because you can't run the 8800 by itself but what you have here is four of the loads are actually up here and because they had all this extra real estate they give you a little extra power meter here so you don't have to have a separate power meter to measure the power of the power supply so what we end up with is ten loads here six of them are 12 volt and then you have a 5 volt 33 volt negative 12 volt a 5 volt standby and it will tell you your voltages your wattage is on each of these rails and then the current that you have program into load tester and then like I was saying about the extra real estate up here for another display this tells you your AC information so you have your AC voltage wattage current frequency that's all in there so you can use that to calculate efficiency if you look at like for example the DC load and then divide but or take your AC load and divided by u DC load than you right off the bat you know you're raising yeah and we can use one of these to do all types of validation mostly checking to make sure the label on the power supply is exact accurate or truthful yeah and there are also options like you showed us a power good button yeah that shows our good signal so the power good signal of your power supply which is I guess basically a response time it's yeah it's exactly it's how long it's waiting for the motherboard to feedback that it's ready for power good right for power from the power supply sure and is that red back in milliseconds like it's right back in the so then I guess the implication is if that number is too high the motherboard might not hope it's too high the motherboard misses it says well there's just the power supplies not ready it's ready much be something wrong the power supply right and then other options so we can program a load in here yep so we can program for example you could put 20 amps on a PCIe cable or something if you wanted to and basically the point of that is to run through validation make sure right yeah so you can either take your loads and distribute it across the six 12-volt rails and just to test the capability of the power supply but also you want to do something like you know we're talking about what is the locate ability or what kind of voltage drop are you're gonna see on a single connector if you load a single connector you can load each of these rails up to you know you can zero everything out and load one up to like 40 amps if you wanted to right just to see what happens if we hook up and ask up to this as well yeah we can start getting things like ripple yeah you just hook your oscilloscope up to here set it to measure AC and by turning this dial here you're gonna be able to measure the rip on each of the rails on the power supply right right and that I guess we should note why ripple is important too because there's not a lot of power supply videos on YouTube so so ripple I'll say from an overclocking standpoint that you can tell you from an engineering standpoint but from my perspective with ripple and builds wide who works with us if you start getting into a category where the ripple is really high you can have potentially stability issues or just power delivery issues in general right which is or both right or both which again my experience practical experience is more is more noticeable or observable with a highly sensitive overclock or something like that but how about how about it does affect overclock more than anything because it is so sensitive at that point obviously Intel they only want it to be within 120 millivolts but horse Intel is working within the specifications they designed their chips for right but obviously I mean ripple is AC current that is passed through to the DC side and being that power supplies are what they call switch mode power supplies where you're switching the frequency of the AC you're actually creating ripple to the AC current and then bringing it through the power supply so it's even more of a problem with switz mode power supplies than anything else you know darn Tesla and so yeah so anything that's not filtered by the power supply because that's what it's up to is is just the power supply has to be able to filter afford sends it out it's going to end up going to the voltage regulators of whatever you're running right right so this is a CPU the GPUs and then like you were saying if you overclock it it's even more sensitive to that and so the more there is to it the more has to deal with it on its end it's much easier to deal with on the power supply yeah sure because we have all this space to you know throw a bunch of caps in there filters a throw it out as much as possible right so if I'm reading reviews on power supplies or watching them where do we classify exceptionally good ripple where it's as acceptable versus unacceptable so personally I find acceptable like for like Jo end user it would be like 60 millivolts 20 millivolts is usually the goal for Corsair just so you know it reviews well more than anything but also you know we do sponsor a lot of overclockers and and even the ones that we don't sponsor they they like you know I'll go to a show and they're using Corsair power supplies because the power supply is not part of the equation of why they're having problems overclocking you know whatever they're overclocking because we do set such you know goals to to bring rippled I mean something like the ax I for example that ripples down to 15 millivolts by spec you know so different testers will get different results but we basically we ax its anything higher than 15 millivolts so but like I said for Jo end-user 60 millivolts but you know really good power supply should be twenty millivolts and at what point doesn't does it become noticeably unacceptable to an end-user I mean when do you start really seeing problems well to actually to an end-user to be perfectly honest it's it's not it shouldn't be it shouldn't be noticeable what and one of the reasons why I got into testing power supply is because if it's really bad it is noticeable and that the end result is killing components so early on in my life and my hardware life I was a head tech of Annie Taylor and I had to deal with a lot of RMA s and we had a lot of system builders that would buy all their parts from us but not necessarily the power supplies because we only sold brand-name power supplies they were too expensive right right so they would buy like as $20 power supplies and and then they'd come back after a year and it's like my motherboard is dead my graphics card is dead they'd have swollen caps burn VRS and I'm like what the hell is going on because of immersion you ever have these problems myself and you're coming in here and like every motherboard you bought from me is now dead after only a year and sure enough we tested them with a low tester an oscilloscope and found that the ripple was higher than 120 millivolts and the voltage regulation was like all over the place it was plus minus five set which is within Intel spec but if it's plus 5% within you know milliseconds right you're driving those voltage regulators on your board absolutely nuts trying to keep up and trying to maintain you know a stable voltage right so to actually run the computer yeah yeah that's a great explanation give me it so closing out here it gives me a the if you're buying let's say a moderately high end power supply and you're looking around at reviews or trying to figure out what you should care about you how do you how do you categorize the different performance aspects of a power supply so on Johnny guru you have the old rating system that you used to use right you talked about things like presentation I think you talked about cable quality occasionally so I mean first thing is always performance and that's like the heaviest weight of the score and that's going to be your voltage regulation ripple suppression but you know another thing that you know we weren't able to test for because these load testers are so loud and setting up a good soundproof room or a box or whatever it can be expensive is noise and that's something that is a big complaint with customers right is the noise of person not just fan noise but also coil whine to the coil why it's hard to catch a be captured because we're using different technologies to switch these power supplies in ways that they're more efficient but unfortunately that introduces more of that audible noise through the magnetics on the power supply and that's what's generically called coil whine right but yeah performance you know just overall performance sound whether it be you know coil whine or fan noise right and then of course just feature set you know does it have enough piece a he connects how long are the cables are they long enough for the case you're gonna put it in single versus multiple 12 volt rail we were you know talking about you know how multiple 12 volt rails are a safety thing right and how all of our power supplies that either have a mechanical switch that switches between multiple and single 12 volt rail or you can switch in the software we always have it a multiple 12 volt rail by default right for safety for safety purposes user wants to throw caution in the wind and said it's single 12 volt rail hey that's up to them that's their choice but at least their machine is up and running we know they didn't pinch a wire inside the side panel of the case and causing a short that would cause a single 12 volt rail to overload and start melting wires well yeah art world you're a side panel right so so those are the things to really look for overall yeah and then of course you know aesthetics are good you know our big thing the cables how well the cables can route and manage that's when you get into things like fully modular versus semi modular fully module obviously easier to do cable management right yeah yeah cool well if you want to learn more about power supplies and hopefully you do check back soon and subscribe if you're not because we're gonna be working with I think this exact equipment or something very similar it's yours there you go check back soon for that thank you John I appreciate it all right thanks Dave we'll see you all next time