Computer Power Supplies - Part 2/2

Computer Power Supplies - Part 2/2 So plug this in and fire it up. Now that’s the power beep. That was not an alarm. Let’s take a look with this power supply. So the first thing that we notice with Thermaltake Power Supply is that everything is consistent. You’ll notice that none of the numbers are moving around, everything looks good 3.3V is pumping exactly 3.3V consistently. The 5V channel is pumping 5.1V which is certainly within the .2 threshold and nothing is fluctuating. So you can see that everything is consistent and nothing is moving around the screen and there’s no certainly no alarms going off. I just to explain what the PG value on the power supply tester means. You remember when we’re testing the 300W power supply we were seeing in 900s and that was setting off an alarm and here we’ve got a nice little value of 370 and no alarm. What the PG value means is that your power supply is set to only turn on the computer when there’s clean power being driven from the power supply. So this power supply within 370 ms is going to be able to get up to power and start generating clean power within that amount of time. And then, not until then your power supply is going to automatically using the PG value, send a signal to the computer to fire it up. So that’s why with the higher end power supply sometimes you push the power button and then it seems to take a split second before it fires up. Where at the low-end power supply it’s just going to turn right away and the problem with that is that your power supply basically generates the power. So it takes a moment for those capacitors and transformers within there to be able to create the clean power. So if the power supply allows the computer to come on immediately, then that’s going to be also driving that dirty power into your computer system. So the Thermaltake Power Supply with the clean PG value is showing us that it is able to wait to fire up the system until it is generating clean power. Let’s take a look at the 550W Thermaltake Power Supply here. Stepping out a notch and basically the reason that you want to go with higher wattages is you’ve got several components within your PC. A lot of times it has to do with gamers, it doesn’t always but certainly a gaming system is going to see a video cards, etcetera that are going to be drawing a lot more power than the standard onboard video. So in those cases, you usually want to step up your power supply because it’s going to be drawing so much more power you want to be able to provide clean power. So if you just got a generic computer system, you’re fine with the 430W power supply but if you want to step it up a little bit and get a little more wattage out of your system this is the way to do it. So we’re going to plug in again all 24 pins plus my 4-pin 12V as well and I going to fire this one out. So we can see once again the Thermaltake Power Supply is providing us with clean power. Again, no numbers are fluctuating. Everything is within an allowable threshold and RPG value is absolutely perfect. Another great thing about Thermaltake Power Supply is they’re extremely quiet. Now this power supply is on right now and I can feel the wind coming off this giant enormous fan. You can tell there’s just no noise coming off of that. And so now we’re going to take a look at the Thermaltake Toughpower Power Supply. This is the 850W model and this is just a dream machine that kind of lock if you will. You can just tell from the weight of it and from the solid construction that this is just really nice high-end power supply. It’s got an enormous fan on it and we’re going to see again that this is a very quiet unit. But one of the things that I love about the Toughpower 850 with the cord management, the cable management system is that the cables. You’ll notice that there’s very, very few cables actually coming out of the power supply and that’s because it’s got an actual day where we can swap out different cables. So if you only need a certain number of cables, you don’t have to have a ton of cables all around up in your computer because if you’re not using it you can just unplug it and put it in your drawer somewhere so you don’t lose it. That’s one of the things about somebody’s power supply that are coming out is that because there’s so many different peripherals with so many different types of connectors these days, you know we’ve got PCI Express, we’ve got the old style 4-pin, we’ve got the SATA cable, so you get this power supply that have all these different cables coming out because everybody needs all these different types of connectors. Well, this is a brilliant idea being able to just putting the ones that you needed and unplug the ones that you don’t. Oh, boy that’s quiet and look at that! Look at those numbers. Absolutely no variances within the voltage, we’ve got a perfect RPG value and everything’s within the threshold. We’ve got a perfect 3.3V and everything looks great. So just recapping what we’ve learned today. Generic power supplies, we’re not going to go there. All right, if you get a computer that has one of this in it just look at the back of your chassis and you can tell that it’s just cheap and flimsy and no name and you wanted to just stay away from it. We saw it and that’s not a brand name thing. We’re not trying to sell brand on you but we saw from the test there what kind of dirty power we can expect from all these unit. You know, well, of course if somebody tries to sell you one of those as well you want to watch it for that. If you have a bad power supply in your computer and your computer tech is trying to sell you a generic power supply, say, “You know what, I want the Thermaltake can you put a Thermaltake in it for me?” Why I am saying Thermaltake when I say I’m not going to try to sell you on brands. Well the simple fact is that I’ve been using Thermaltake for couple of years now in my own system. I could not believe the increase in performance for my system because I found out that I had a dirty power supply. I was using a higher end generic power supply in my computer system at that time and since I switch to Thermaltake and since our company switch to Thermaltake, here’s the thing, we haven’t had a single computer come back with power supply related issues. Now that’s not to say that a Thermaltake Power Supply will not fail because that’s just not logical to say, every component can fail but what I’ve seen consistently through my own experience in business is that the Thermaltake power supplies are a lot more reliable. Again, we haven’t seen one come back yet and as we’ve seen from the test here using three different levels of Thermaltake power supplies each one of these have tested perfect. Even looking at the pure power 430 which we will consider an entry level power supply, you put that in your computer system, you’re going to increase performance. You’re not going to be spending a whole lot of money because it is just the entry level. But because Thermaltake has all these different tears of power supplies we can step it up a notch into the gaming level. We can step it right up into the top power level which is great for servers and for a higher end PCs but because there are so many tears we can find something within our price point that’s still going to be getting us increased performance from a Thermaltake power supply. We’re going to be getting that clean power to our system and we’re going to be preventing damage. So I do hope that the next time you check out the power, next time you buy a power supply or want to increase the performance of your PC make sure you check out Thermaltake’s line of power supplies. For Category5 Technology TV, I'm Robbie Ferguson.