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A WATER COOLED POWER SUPPLY? ARE THEY NUTS??

2017-11-08
okay okay I know what you're thinking water plus a high amperage transformer that can literally blow up and take the rest of your computer hardware with it what could go wrong good idea or bad idea it's here and our goal today is to find out if the usual benefits of liquid cooling quieter cooler operation can also apply to a power supply and we wouldn't be able to do it without tunnel Baer tunnel barrier makes it easy to privately and securely browse a more open Internet Tritonal bear for free at tunnel bear comm /l tt so the first thing that caught our attention about this product aside from it being a water-cooled power supply was the standard G one-quarter openings complete with bits power logo under the modular power connectors if they were trying to do a quality job they definitely found a solid partner so let's keep going then the internals do still have a fan making this a hybrid design similar to a Seuss's poseidon series of graphics cards but at the bottom of the main PCB there is also what appears to be a full-length water block it doesn't seem to have any fins but it does have a flow meter interesting now the NDA that we signed prevents us from tearing down our unit to show you exactly what that plate makes contact with but everything we can see from peering inside suggests that the internal heatsink array is pretty typical of a normal air-cooled power supply and nothing on the fan side suggested that special design considerations had been made to accommodate transferring the heat to the water block so maybe the top mounted heat sinks run all the way through the PCB holes to the base of the block or maybe there's just a big thick thermal pad on the bottom of a completely normal power supply we actually don't know but none of this prevents us from answering our original question anyway so let's move on to find out if cooler and quieter can be achieved through FS P's method whatever it is we tested our unit in both air and liquid cooled mode and also compared it to one of the best air cooled power supplies on the market the corsair ax 1200 I we ran each of them at idle 2/3 load and max capacity taking both thermal and acoustic measurements now one does not simply make a system consume 1,200 watts of power without some seriously overkill hardware so to achieve that we rigged up an X to ninety-nine platform with the 16 core core I 979 60 X overclocked to 4.2 Jigga Hertz then we threw four overclocked Titan X Pascal's on to the rig for some gpgpu rendering and ah beautiful just over 1,400 watts from the wall so with some CPU voltage adjustments we got our system dialed in to about 1200 watts we then used cable mod extenders to be able to have the power supply in a separate room in order to control sound leakage first up then our air cooled testing at idle both units remain silent neither of their fans turned on nothing to see here at 2/3 load the FSP fan spun up to about 800 rpm and our formal imagery showed hotspots inside the unit at over 77 degrees Celsius our xx sound meter read 44 decibels and I'd say subjectively it was about as loud as a d5 pump at 12 volts by comparison our corsair ax i reached only 700 RPM and was ever so slightly quieter at full 1200 watt load the fan spun up all the way to about 1200 rpm reaching 50 decibels and it was definitely audible over our 12 volt t5 pump making it the worst offender in a hypothetical system being pushed to the limits we saw two significant hotspots with our thermal camera and we even experienced some strange clicking and crackling noises for comparison our course air hit only 950 rpm at 46 decibels making it significantly less noticeable over a d5 not to mention that there was no crackling but it was noticeable over a d5 so maybe there is some improvement to be had from water cooling and besides this the hydro PTM Plus 1200 watt was never meant to be air-cooled so let's throw this fish back in its natural habitat with a 240 millimeter liquid cooler hooked up we started with this power supply at 2/3 load and oh well that's kind of weird the fan turned on it did spin at a slightly lower rpm than when it was air-cooled but while our noise measurements did go down we actually didn't find that it made a noticeable difference compared to all air that mid point heat spot was gone though at full bore the fan spun up to 900 ish rpm quite a bit lower than when it was air-cooled but it was still audible over a d5 with pretty much the same heat spots on the fan side so what happened here well without being able to take the unit apart to confirm our the block is only cooling the back side of the PCB theory it remains just that a theory but one that is somewhat corroborated by these renders that we found on FS B's website to be clear we did observe an improvement and it is possible that a liquid cooled power supply could achieve better cooling and noise characteristics than an equivalent air-cooled one but the implementation on this one did leave a bit to be desired we had really hoped that the fan wouldn't be needed at all as long as the water cooling didn't fail so I would like to see a second attempt at this concept but maybe one that is more tightly integrated with the water block actually directly making contact with the heat producing parts of the power supply maybe then FSP would be on to something as it stands at the time of filming we actually don't know the price of this unit but we don't think it really matters anyway however much it is we really don't see the point of paying extra for it over another high quality high wattage power supply unless you just must have everything in your system liquid cooled for like Ășltimo bragging rights speaking of ultimate bragging rights you can brag about your Squarespace website when you create it in just a matter of like I mean anything from minutes to actually you can spend a long time on Squarespace site but the point is no matter how much time you spend on it it's gonna look great 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