Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2 Video

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Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2

Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2 Hey, I’m Robbie with Category5 Technology TV. And today I’m going to be showing you why you should never buy or sell an LGPO power supply. And when you say LGPO you mean basically the power supplies that included with your computer chassis purchase, even the power supplies that you can purchase for under $50.00 Canadian, anything and around there are probably going to be problematic. Now we’re going to be showing today why that is and why we should avoid those types of power supplies. So for my demonstration today, I’m going to be using two generic power supplies that just came out of retail chassis. I’ve got a 300W and a 430W there on the bottom. Another this carry and it kind of brand labels, so they are just generic, no name if you will and they’re certainly on the sub $50.00 Canadian range but they were just pulled directly from retail chassis over a purchase. On the other hand, over here we’ve got Thermaltake line. I’ve got a Thermaltake entry level Pure Power 430W power supply. On the top down here stepping up from it there is a 550W from Thermaltake and here we’ve got the Toughpower from Thermaltake. It’s 850W and we’re going to take a look at that in just a few minutes comparing all of these power supplies together and finding out why we should stay away from these bad boys. Now what I’m holding in my hand here is something that you should be in every IT technician’s toolbox if you ask me. This is a FrozenCPU LCD power supply tester and of course it does exactly what you would think from the name. Basically what happened to me and I’ll be just completely blunt honest with you here. When we first started our business several years back doing computer sales and service, one of the mistakes that I made, you know we learn from our mistakes but one of those mistakes was that we actually allowed these types of power supply out of the shop. We were bringing computer chassis or computer cases that would include these types of power supplies and we would allow, you know, that was a great deal on it. So we would allow those to go out of the shop. But started to see a trend because after about a year we would start CDs computers computer coming back into the shop for miscellaneous repairs and they were hardware problems. Now on software of course you’ve got to maintain and you got to have your computer actually physically cleaned out of dust and things like that but actual hardware failures that’s not something I want to see within five years let alone one. So we started looking at the power supply and realizing that more often than not that power supply had to be replaced. Now looking at longevity one year for a power supply is just unacceptable but that said. We also started to detect miscellaneous issues with the power supplies. So that’s when we pick up the power supplier tester. I’m going to show today the kinds of issues that the two kinds of power supplies can cost to your system. If your power supply like this is going to be providing dirty power or fluctuating power that’s going to be fluctuating between different voltages that’s going to cause some problems with stability as well as with the actual performance of your computer. We step into a slightly higher end power supply such as the Thermaltake Pure Power 430 and we’re going to start to see a lot more consistency when it comes to the actual voltage that’s being sent to our computer. And because of that our motherboards going to be happy, our CPU is going to be happy, our RAM is going to be happy, everything in our system is going to be a lot happier with the Thermaltake power supply than it is with one of these because it’s going to be receiving a steady consistent voltage and it’s in the right voltage range. So that’s going to improve performance ten fold. You’ll be actually be surprised how much a better power supply is going to improve the performance of your PC. All right, first that I want to take a look this 300W generic power supply, all I’m going to do is put this up to my supply tester and that power supply tester is going to just check all the voltages, make sure that everything is consistent and make sure that this power supply is going to be providing clean power and consistent power to our computer. Now you hear that beep. That immediately tells us there’s problem with this power supply. Let’s take a closer look. Now you can see that there are two problems being reported by the power supply tester with this particular power supply to the 300W and what does it telling us up in the top left hand corner is that what’s supposed to a 5V signal is fluctuating between about 4.8V and 5.2, so that sending basically dirty power. Our computer is expecting to be receiving a pure 5V signal instead because of the .4 variance fluctuation we’re receiving a dirty signal. We’re getting basically a fluctuation in the power which is going up and down, and up and down consistently. So when our computers expecting a perfectly clean 5V signal and receiving such a dirty signal and that’s going to possibly cause damage to our motherboard including blown out capacitors and things like that and of course if you’re using like a Socket Force Navigator or something that’s a little harder to find these days. You could run into a situation where you have to not only replace your motherboard because you no longer can’t buy CPUs or motherboards in that range. You may not have to replace both your motherboards, your CPU, plus possibly your RAM and your video card. So that can be very, very costly, so that’s why we start looking at buying new power supplies as a preliminary step to preventing damage to our computers. Let’s take a look at this 430W power supply as well and see what kind of problems we can expect from that generic power supply. Okay, so I’ve just fired a power into this and we can see that there is problem on a 3.3V signal. It’s supposed to be receiving exactly 3.3V however, we’re seeing that right now it’s receiving 3.6 and it’s fluctuating, now it’s going down to 3.5. So what tells me is that this power supply has an inconsistency. Now 3.5 would be acceptable but because there’s fluctuation there when it first fired up it was 3.7, 3.8, there again I just plug it back in it went up to 3.6 and then back down to 3.5. So we can see that it’s not providing consistently clean power. Interesting thing with this one as well is that I’m noticing as we’re doing this test that occasionally after I turned it off and back on, it’s not coming back on and so that tells us nasty. Now see if I am plug the power from the power supply tester that resets it and unplug it back in. We can see that it’s fired back up. So what that tells me is this power supply is not able to being handle a load, so there’s problem not only on 3.3V channel but also in its ability to hold the load. So that means that this power supply is going in the garbage. So let’s get this one of the power supply tester and we’re going to hook up our first Thermaltake product and find out how more consistent we can expect our power to be. This power supply is the Thermaltake Pure Power 430W. Basically what we would consider an entry level power supply. This is something that we would put into generic systems, residential systems or if somebody or one of our clients had a power supply that was defective or one of this generics that will showing any kinds of signs of causing potential damage to the user’s computer we would put in one of these as long as this was sufficient power. So a 430W that’s certainly sufficient for most residential computers and certainly office computers but higher end gaming systems we’re going to be looking at more powerful supplies. But let’s hook this up to my power supply tester just to show what kind of power we can expect from this unit and you’ll notice that with the Thermaltake power supplies I was mentioning earlier about the cabling. These cables are nicely round and what that does for us is that none is that it a little bit cleaner inside of our system makes it easier to manage the cables and you can see that there are much more independent. These cables don’t tend to get tangled like the other cables do. I can easily just pull out one cable and they’re not tangled. But the other advantage to this is the fact that in our computer system with a cable like this. Now see they’re tangled. Something like this is going to block airflow because there are just so many cables just kind of hanging about the system. With these guys on the other hand they’re easy to tie up. They’re easy to tie into the computer chassis itself and so it’s going to allow and increase of air flow into the system and out of the system so that you can get a cooler running computer system and that’s another way to improve performance.

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Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2

Hey, I’m Robbie with Category5 Technology TV. And today I’m going to be showing you why you should never buy or sell an LGPO power supply. And when you say LGPO you mean basically the power supplies that included with your computer chassis purchase, even the power supplies that you can purchase for under $50.00 Canadian, anything and around there are probably going to be problematic. Now we’re going to be showing today why that is and why we should avoid those types of power supplies.

So for my demonstration today, I’m going to be using two generic power supplies that just came out of retail chassis. I’ve got a 300W and a 430W there on the bottom. Another this carry and it kind of brand labels, so they are just generic, no name if you will and they’re certainly on the sub $50.00 Canadian range but they were just pulled directly from retail chassis over a purchase.

On the other hand, over here we’ve got Thermaltake line. I’ve got a Thermaltake entry level Pure Power 430W power supply. On the top down here stepping up from it there is a 550W from Thermaltake and here we’ve got the Toughpower from Thermaltake. It’s 850W and we’re going to take a look at that in just a few minutes comparing all of these power supplies together and finding out why we should stay away from these bad boys.

Now what I’m holding in my hand here is something that you should be in every IT technician’s toolbox if you ask me. This is a FrozenCPU LCD power supply tester and of course it does exactly what you would think from the name. Basically what happened to me and I’ll be just completely blunt honest with you here. When we first started our business several years back doing computer sales and service, one of the mistakes that I made, you know we learn from our mistakes but one of those mistakes was that we actually allowed these types of power supply out of the shop. We were bringing computer chassis or computer cases that would include these types of power supplies and we would allow, you know, that was a great deal on it. So we would allow those to go out of the shop.

But started to see a trend because after about a year we would start CDs computers computer coming back into the shop for miscellaneous repairs and they were hardware problems. Now on software of course you’ve got to maintain and you got to have your computer actually physically cleaned out of dust and things like that but actual hardware failures that’s not something I want to see within five years let alone one.

So we started looking at the power supply and realizing that more often than not that power supply had to be replaced. Now looking at longevity one year for a power supply is just unacceptable but that said. We also started to detect miscellaneous issues with the power supplies. So that’s when we pick up the power supplier tester. I’m going to show today the kinds of issues that the two kinds of power supplies can cost to your system.

If your power supply like this is going to be providing dirty power or fluctuating power that’s going to be fluctuating between different voltages that’s going to cause some problems with stability as well as with the actual performance of your computer. We step into a slightly higher end power supply such as the Thermaltake Pure Power 430 and we’re going to start to see a lot more consistency when it comes to the actual voltage that’s being sent to our computer. And because of that our motherboards going to be happy, our CPU is going to be happy, our RAM is going to be happy, everything in our system is going to be a lot happier with the Thermaltake power supply than it is with one of these because it’s going to be receiving a steady consistent voltage and it’s in the right voltage range.

So that’s going to improve performance ten fold. You’ll be actually be surprised how much a better power supply is going to improve the performance of your PC. All right, first that I want to take a look this 300W generic power supply, all I’m going to do is put this up to my supply tester and that power supply tester is going to just check all the voltages, make sure that everything is consistent and make sure that this power supply is going to be providing clean power and consistent power to our computer.

Now you hear that beep. That immediately tells us there’s problem with this power supply. Let’s take a closer look. Now you can see that there are two problems being reported by the power supply tester with this particular power supply to the 300W and what does it telling us up in the top left hand corner is that what’s supposed to a 5V signal is fluctuating between about 4.8V and 5.2, so that sending basically dirty power. Our computer is expecting to be receiving a pure 5V signal instead because of the .4 variance fluctuation we’re receiving a dirty signal.

We’re getting basically a fluctuation in the power which is going up and down, and up and down consistently. So when our computers expecting a perfectly clean 5V signal and receiving such a dirty signal and that’s going to possibly cause damage to our motherboard including blown out capacitors and things like that and of course if you’re using like a Socket Force Navigator or something that’s a little harder to find these days.

You could run into a situation where you have to not only replace your motherboard because you no longer can’t buy CPUs or motherboards in that range. You may not have to replace both your motherboards, your CPU, plus possibly your RAM and your video card. So that can be very, very costly, so that’s why we start looking at buying new power supplies as a preliminary step to preventing damage to our computers.

Let’s take a look at this 430W power supply as well and see what kind of problems we can expect from that generic power supply. Okay, so I’ve just fired a power into this and we can see that there is problem on a 3.3V signal. It’s supposed to be receiving exactly 3.3V however, we’re seeing that right now it’s receiving 3.6 and it’s fluctuating, now it’s going down to 3.5. So what tells me is that this power supply has an inconsistency. Now 3.5 would be acceptable but because there’s fluctuation there when it first fired up it was 3.7, 3.8, there again I just plug it back in it went up to 3.6 and then back down to 3.5.

So we can see that it’s not providing consistently clean power. Interesting thing with this one as well is that I’m noticing as we’re doing this test that occasionally after I turned it off and back on, it’s not coming back on and so that tells us nasty. Now see if I am plug the power from the power supply tester that resets it and unplug it back in. We can see that it’s fired back up. So what that tells me is this power supply is not able to being handle a load, so there’s problem not only on 3.3V channel but also in its ability to hold the load. So that means that this power supply is going in the garbage.

So let’s get this one of the power supply tester and we’re going to hook up our first Thermaltake product and find out how more consistent we can expect our power to be. This power supply is the Thermaltake Pure Power 430W. Basically what we would consider an entry level power supply. This is something that we would put into generic systems, residential systems or if somebody or one of our clients had a power supply that was defective or one of this generics that will showing any kinds of signs of causing potential damage to the user’s computer we would put in one of these as long as this was sufficient power.

So a 430W that’s certainly sufficient for most residential computers and certainly office computers but higher end gaming systems we’re going to be looking at more powerful supplies. But let’s hook this up to my power supply tester just to show what kind of power we can expect from this unit and you’ll notice that with the Thermaltake power supplies I was mentioning earlier about the cabling. These cables are nicely round and what that does for us is that none is that it a little bit cleaner inside of our system makes it easier to manage the cables and you can see that there are much more independent. These cables don’t tend to get tangled like the other cables do. I can easily just pull out one cable and they’re not tangled.

But the other advantage to this is the fact that in our computer system with a cable like this. Now see they’re tangled. Something like this is going to block airflow because there are just so many cables just kind of hanging about the system. With these guys on the other hand they’re easy to tie up. They’re easy to tie into the computer chassis itself and so it’s going to allow and increase of air flow into the system and out of the system so that you can get a cooler running computer system and that’s another way to improve performance.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services

Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2

Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2 -

Computer Power Supplies - Part 1/2 -