Power Supply Reviews - Why 99% of online reviews are WRONG!!!

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by dlb, Apr 20, 2010.

  1. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    The fine folks over at Hardware Secrets are pretty well known for their excellent reviews of different hardware, including power supplies. They are one of the few sites that really knows how to test a power supply. There is MUCH more to it than hooking up a digital multimeter to a spare molex connector and then running an assortment of load/idle tests and recording the output from the multimeter. Most sites will not test the noise and ripple in a PSU (and "noise" here does not mean the sound from the fan, it means "line noise"; a decent metaphor would be "static"). I recently read a review where the testing uses only a voltmeter, and the reviewer states the power supply had a bit more ripple than he would like to see. :confused Without an oscilloscope, it is impossible to measure ripple, so it would appear that the reviewer is talking out his a** and has no idea what "ripple" really means or what it is. This review can be found here, the "ripple" comment is on page 5, on page 6 you'll see the PSU received a "Top Rank Award". However, Hardware Secrets reviewed this same power supply (review is here), and you'll see that it miserably failed the ripple/noise testing, and in fact the unit burned up when trying to draw the advertised 750w the unit is rated for. Yet the other reviewer gave it a "Top Rank Award". So- all ranting aside, do not trust any power supply review that doesn't include 'scope shots of the line noise and ripple at various load levels. A PSU with excessive ripple can slowly damage PC components over time, and can lead to instability, BSOD errors, and erratic behavior. The full article of "Why 99% of Power Supply Reviews are WRONG!" can be read over at Hardware Secrets by clicking this link. If you're in the market for new PSU, do yourself a favor, and READ THIS ARTICLE!!!

    [dlb]
    :-D
     
  2. jlphlp

    jlphlp Master Sergeant

    Hi,

    Good report except that setting a voltmeter to AC and measuring a DC voltage will give you a reading of the AC component (Ripple) riding on the DC.

    Jim
     
  3. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    Here's another example of a reviewer using the term "ripple" completely incorrectly. They're calling the variance of the voltage output on a particular rail "ripple". For example: during normal usage, the 12v rail (or 3.3v rail or 5v rail) will vary a bit, it will go up and down from 12.10 to 12.13 to 12.08 and so on. These little changes are NOT ripple. This is fluctuation or variance, not ripple. Here's the link to page 3 of this particular review:
    http://www.thinkcomputers.org/sparkle-gold-class-1250w-modular-power-supply-review/3/
    Another example of a poor power supply review using incorrect terminology. This tells me that the reviewer (and the web site on the whole for publishing the review) has absolutely no idea what they're talking about. In this review, they're using a software tool to monitor voltage fluctuation. Not necessarily the most accurate way to monitor voltage changes, but whatever. But where they go wrong is reporting these changes as ripple. If you look at the screen shots in that review, you'll see that the software they're using uses the term "ripple" instead of the much more accurate "fluctuation" as the label for how much variance there was in voltage output on a particular rail. Again, this shows that the web site is relying on the "knowledge" of someone else (in this case, the developer of the software they use to monitor voltage) to report the results, instead of doing some real testing that requires much more than running a typical hardware monitor app in the background while 3DMark2006 (or some other 'stress test') is running. It's just all wrong on several levels....

    :( Sad . . . very, very sad :cry
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2010

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