Slashdot Mirror
Thirty Four PSUs Tested - Is Biggest Best?
SteveK writes "Hexus has been testing some 34 PC power supplies to see which is best. There are some interesting results. An Enermax 535 Watt PSU couldn't deliver much over 450W, while a cheap 250W PSU did exactly what it said on the box. There's also a video of a (very cheap) 650W PSU under 400W of load, requiring over 1kW of input power to sustain the load, before blowing up."
Mod me down for slander, but I don't understand why we keep linking to Hexus reviews. Their content quality is high but their servers can't take a slashdotting for more than 3-4 minutes. 0 comments and it's taken over a minute to load as it is :(.
It's a fairly popular high-end PSU brand. Seems like it should have been included in the review. Hmmm...
Quality usually goes hand in hand with price. The best ones are usually the most expensive (PC Power and Cooling). The cheap ones do stupid crap like toss 400 watts onto the 5 volt rail and then call it a 650 watt power supply, when it might crash when you put in that 7800 GTX. Cheap supplies also often are very inefficient, dissipating huge amounts of perfectly good elecricity as heat. There are some exceptions to the rule, but in general I've found that the better ones tend to cost more.
Maybe try a Coral Cache url instead of linking directly to Hexis http://www.hexus.net.nyud.net:8090/content/static/ psu_roundup.html
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Well, I can't RTFA due to some other people trying to do so, but a good test setup usually includes a "clean" primary power supply for fairness as was already suggested and then some fun add-ons to simulate controlled SNAFUs like bursts, surges and very short interruptions of up to, say, 100ms.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I assume you guys are server-limited, not bandwidth-limited, when the Slashdot beast comes around. So why don't you put up a static version of the page when the Slashdotting hits? Why don't you at least use some sort of caching to reduce the load on your servers? Is there something obvious that I, not being a mighty server admin, am missing?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Easy enough, look to the telcom world.
Get some nice -48V atx dcdc converters for your boxes, and a couple of really nice rectifiers.
Makes battery (and generator) backup so much easier, and it's much more efficient.
Coral Cache link, and at least page one is there.
/ psu_roundup.html
Use this one instead of the submitter's link!
http://www.hexus.net.nyud.net:8090/content/static
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'd just like to add that HEC power supplies are also surprisingly quiet and generally very reasonably priced. Sparkle PSUs are loud SOBs, but the parent here is absolutely right: Sparkle and HEC units are generally so reliable that they verge on boring. Which is very good thing to say about power supplies.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Only 19 PSUs tested, but you can still get to the site (for now).
. html
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/200507111/index
To cut to the chase, TH recommended the Fortron FSP300-60GNF and the Seasonic S12 600.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
no Antec must mean they didn't get a "free" one
From TFA:
We were very careful to use retail power supplies for our testing, mindful of not falling into the trap of asking manufacturers for supplies only to have special units sent which stand up more than a retail unit would.
That was a bad on their part, but they do have alot of the other "major" Power Supply venders. Q-Technology, Hiper and Fortron are respected brands. Antec is our company's main PSU and we have never had a problem with them. Too bad they weren't there.
The review tested all these products in FSG Groups facility, an employee of FSG Group is said to be "sexy" in the review, and a product from FSG Group won? Yeah, right...
I'd like to express my appreciation to these guys for performing a much-needed analysis and publishing the results for all to see. It's about time someone called PSU manufacturers' bluffs and published testing results for multiple brands and models. They even made sure to test mostly retail models to prevent the possibility of manufacturers supplying souped-up units.
t count=15
Looks like the moral of the story is to look carefully to see whether the rating on the box is for peak or sustainable power output. I just had a cheap "550 Watt" PSU blow out on me a few weeks ago after about 8 months of moderate to heavy use (lots of hard drives, ATI Radeon 9800Pro, Athlon XP 3200+, but no neons or anything fancy like that), and bought a more expensive replacement in hopes that it will be of a higher quality. Several friends and family members have also had PSU troubles in the past few months. This article would have been nice to refer to when shopping for replacements.
Like many of the other posters here and in the HEXUS forum, I'm looking forward to future roundups that cover other brands. It was mentioned on the HEXUS forum that Antec and other brands will probably make the next round: http://forums.hexus.net/showpost.php?p=584160&pos
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
In some installations, a 400V DC bus is used for simpler, more efficient and more reliable power distribution. By centralizing line inputs, it is easier to do power factor corrections, power conditioning and since it is all DC, a battery bank directly across the DC bus can replace the UPS. Each (sub-)system afterwards has it own DC-DC converter.
Why is power distribution done at high voltages? Simple: to reduce conduction losses in wires, semiconductors and other devices. Old systems were based on 5V until ATX came along, at which point 3.3V systems became the norm for a short while - stepping down from 3.3V involved too high currents to be practical, this is how we ended up with ATX-12V and today's 12V-based systems where most/all MoBo regulators are fed off the 12V rail.
In the near future, every device will have some form of on-board power regulation - many chips already do have built-in linear regulators for their more sensitive circuits. The trend to ever more localized power regulation is required by high-performance/high-speed circuitry which needs very fast transient response. Look at Intel's recent mobile CPU announcement: the next Pentium-M generation will be multi-chip modules containing, in addition to the CPU, both the north bridge and Vcore regulator.
If you go from line to load, power goes through 3-6 voltage regulators before reaching the target:
1- active PFC (relatively few PSUs where not required by law)
2- bulk transformer
3- magnetic regulator (for most PSUs that actually regulate auxiliary rails)
4- MoBo regulators
5- on-card/device regulators
6- on-chip regulators
Modern CPUs and GPUs require microsecond-scale response time from the bulk PSU when going from idle to 100% load. Failure to deliver will cause crashes. Integrated regulator can have sub-microsecond response times, local board-level regulators are at the microsecond scale and response times quickly climb in the tens of microseconds afterwards due to wiring impedance.
So, the DC-bus is pretty much as close to centralized power regulation that would be practical with high-speed loads.
Actually, no... having looked inside a PSU, it is odd what they do. If you are running off 110, they voltage-double to about 300VDC and chop that; if you are running off 230, they rectify to about 300VDC and chop that. There is actually slightly more heat loss off the voltage doubler, so a PSU is slightly less efficient running on 110V. Why do they do this? Well, I can't be certain, but I think it's because that way they can switch between 110 and 230VAC with a single-pole, single-throw switch, which is cheap; and the circuitry that either doubles or rectifies is equally cheap (two diodes, two capacitors).
Comment removed based on user account deletion