Gadgetory

I've been issued a challenge by the cameraman to start today's episode with a word other than so so that was my attempt at it and moving on we are going to be looking at power supplies today I get a lot of personal messages on YouTube asking me for especially power supply recommendations because everyone can look up benchmarks for a video card or a CPU and everyone can look up a price that's easy okay I need this much performance I want to pay this much easy done however for power supply it starts to get a little bit more complicated because there's so much misinformation out there about what kind of a power supply you need like for example you'll see you'll see specs on a CPU like 140 watts well that's a TDP that's not actually the wattage that that CPU consumes from a power supply so there's there's and then you've got a video card that might output you know a 150 watt heat load but that's what's in heat so that's that's not useful for for this either so basically I wanted to do a quick recommendation video on a basic power supply that I think is just one of the best no frills no gimmicks power supplies out on the market now these two you look at them and they look pretty similar but for power supply all of the important stuff is what goes on under the plain metal casing so let's start with looking at what I would call not a very solid power supply this is what I would consider a doorstop okay so there's no particular markings you can find you can find a rated output on here so 18 amps total on the 12 volt rail is not very strong by today's standards the 12 volt rail is very important so that's part of what makes it a budget cheapo power supply okay you can see that it doesn't have this is one that I use for testing fans actually but the actual stock connectors on it are very few it doesn't even have a PCI Express connector because honestly if you have a dedicated video card you shouldn't be using a doorstop power supply it also uses an 80 millimeter fan for cooling which means it's not going to be as quiet as a quality power supply and it not going to run as cool so that brings us into what I believe is one of the best value power supplies on the market this is the CE Sonic SS 400 et it is a 400 watt power supply and unless you're looking at a very basic system 400 watts is pretty much where I would start now yes you can probably power you know integrated video AMD quad core with you know a hard drive all your standard stuff off a 250 or even 300 watt power supply no problem but a 400 watt power supply is going to be built a little bit better you're going to get 80 plus bronze certification and you also get expandability for the future that is a big thing that I always stress when people ask me for a power supply recommendation is that it's not always about what you're hooking up to it today it's more about what you may need to hook up to it in the future so you can see this one it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that you'll find on the higher end models but what it does have is a 24-pin connector for the for the motherboard it has either an 8 pin or a 4 pin connector so you can see on a cheaper unit you might only find a four pin p4 connector okay so that gives you the proper connectors you need for a modern motherboard it's got proper SATA connectors so you got 4 SATA connectors which means you can actually add more hard drives to your system whereas a really basic unit might only have one or two SATA connectors on it I mean yeah you can use adapters but then you're just adding more cable clutter and more in efficiencies to it and then you've also got an adequate number of molex connectors as well as one PCI Express connector so really the 350 watt 400 watt range is where you start getting into power supplies that can genuinely power a dedicated graphics card and a 400 watt unit like this with great efficiency is going to be good for even up to like a mid-range video card like a 57 70 so this gets my recommendation gold star also yeah here's another thing to look at you can see that when you start to look at a quality built power supply you find dual 12-volt rails capable of providing up to 360 watts combined so those 12-volt rails are almost capable of providing the full power of this power supply that's how you can tell it's a modernly designed well built unit because most modern systems are going to rely very heavily on that twelve volt rail you also get silence see sonic is really known for their quiet power supplies and you can see that even on their low-end models they equip them with 120-millimeter fans as well as 80 plus 80 plus goes a long way towards making sure that this fan is not spinning really hard to get rid of excess heat from inefficiency you got a nice efficient unit running a nice quiet 120mm fan that's how you're going to make sure you have a good power supply experience on the back you've just got a standard honeycomb grille so that's where the exhaust air is going to come out from that 120mm fan and then you've got your standard power input as well as an on/off switch this is very convenient that's another thing again you may not find on a low end power supply in order to completely cut the power off from your system with this unit you have to pull the power cord it's just not convenient like I know you don't have to turn off the system manually at the back very often but if you ever do it's nice to have the switch just those little things are what makes buying a decent quality power supply very very important it also just doesn't cost that much more and it's going to give you better reliability overall for your computer because the power supply is often one of the first things to fail so if you buy a good quality power supply and a good quality motherboard that's the other big one then you can be sure your system is going to last for a long time