This is the most popular power supply on the market.
But is that really a smart thing?
The truth is that it's really hard to know.
That's why eight years ago,
we stopped making power supply videos altogether
because doing them properly takes tens of thousands
of dollars of equipment and years of education
and doing them halfway is basically meaningless.
But people still need power supplies, so what do they do?
Well, they can either go a hive mind
and buy whatever's popular
or the smart folks have been relying on community resources
like the LTT forum power supply tier list.
Unfortunately, as we're about to find out,
a community of enthusiasts, however well intentioned,
doesn't always get it right.
For example, they were right
about the Thermaltake smart series.
This thing is truly C tier at best.
It didn't even survive our testing.
But there's another unit that turned out to be really solid
even though it's actually buried with the other C tiers.
Just like I buried this lazy C tier segue to our sponsor.
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There are two main questions we set out to answer today.
One, is the smart series from Thermaltake that bad?
And two, if it is, and it is,
what can we recommend for gamers on a budget?
In the long term, the goal for the labs team here
is to test basically every power supply on the market
and then capture the data in an easily digestible format.
Unfortunately, that's a ways off.
So to get you some answers faster,
we ran through just enough models to provide a baseline
and a confident recommendation.
With that in mind then, let's look at the test setup.
The big change is we finally have the last piece we need
to test more than just the basics, an oscilloscope.
Or well, more accurately, we have three oscilloscopes.
We're only gonna need one in the end,
but like, you know, you should drive more than one car
before you write the check and take it home.
And these have car level price tags.
So we wanted to test drive at least a few of them.
An oscilloscope doesn't just allow us to perform more tests.
More crucially, it allows us to verify
that our tests are actually doing
what we think they're doing,
which we need because we now have a lot of tests.
This one I'm running right now, for example,
is part of the ATX specification.
It's called the timing test,
and it ensures that when the power supply gets jumpered
and turns on and turns off,
the rails come up to the levels that you expect
in the order that you expect.
This allows the system to wake from sleep
and go back to sleep predictably.
Now, we don't just run this once.
We've got light loads, heavy loads.
Actually, you can see there's an entire list of tests
that it's gonna go through that takes about four hours.
The good news is that the suite should be able to run
once we've got everything dialed in
with zero human intervention required,
all culminating in this.
Okay, we have a lot of work to do to make this readable
by those of us who are not robots.
Also, as I'm sure you've guessed,
this nest of wires here will not exist
in the final setup,
and it's worth noting that adding extra wire length
will have some adverse effects,
including dropping our voltage readings a little bit.
We've got big plans to enhance the test suite still, though,
so I just want you guys to know
that the numbers in this video
are only intended to be compared to each other
and to collect feedback from our community
on what you guys wanna see included in the future.
This won't make it into our final database.
Enough preamble, though.
Let's take a closer look at our contenders.
As a baseline for a quality unit,
we've got the Seasonic Prime TX650,
but the main showdown that we're interested in here
is the EVGA450BR versus the Thermaltake Smart 600.
These two $50 specimens perfectly demonstrate
why buying a power supply on a budget
can be really challenging,
and part of that is the manufacturer's fault.
I mean, you would think that price being equal,
obviously you want the one that can provide a third
more power, right?
But as it turns out, surprise, surprise,
the big number on the box doesn't tell the whole story.
If we look closely here,
we can see that while the Thermaltake Smart 600
is technically a 600-watt power supply,
unlike most 600-watt units,
it's actually only able to deliver
about 500 watts on the 12-volt rail,
and it relies on the 5-volt and 3.3-volt rails
to make up the rest.
Now, in the past, you might've had three or four
hard drives in your computer and a couple of CD burners,
but these days, most people don't have any of that stuff,
and a single strong 12-volt rail is preferred.
With that said though, 504 watts is still more than 450,
so all other things being equal,
EVGA is kind of looking like the loser here.
Of course, all other things are not equal.
Shifting gears, you might've noticed
that our Thermaltake unit is only certified 80-plus white,
which means that our 80-plus bronze Challenger
could have up to a 5% advantage in efficiency
depending on the load,
which brings us to the end of what we can learn
from reading boxes and to the beginning of our testing.
In the real world, the EVGA was actually
only one to 2% more efficient.
That's an amount that you aren't likely to notice
on your monthly power bill, so let's dig deeper.
Realistically, the main concern with a $50 power supply is,
can this work reliably without burning my house down?
So we'll start with short circuit testing.
Seriously, you guys, this'll be automated.
We have a whole box that does all this stuff
as part of the power supply tester,
but in order to illustrate what's happening,
in the event that something bad were to happen
in your computer, say a plastic connector melted
or something like that,
and the wires ended up touching each other,
you would end up with a short circuit.
If the power supply stayed on, even at 12 volts,
it could start to push a serious amount of amperage,
heating up those wires, melting plastic, and causing a fire.
So what you want to happen is when you touch these,
the voltage should go to zero,
the power supply should have to be reset.
Boop.
Whoa, and I had them touching again when I did that.
See, look, the system works.
And now it's back on.
This Corsair unit worked perfectly.
The good news is all the power supplies we tested,
including the Thermaltake Smart,
had no problem with this short circuit test.
And that's good because if they did,
they are literal fire hazards
and should not be legal to sell.
Up next is overcurrent protection.
In this test, each rail,
which is essentially each voltage
the power supply can deliver,
gets loaded up to see how much power it'll put out
before shutting off.
And this one is a balancing act for manufacturers.
I mean, they don't want your system to just shut off
if there's a momentary spike in power draw
during a gaming session and it goes to 505 watts.
But if you were to exceed the rating
of a power supply's internal components over a long period,
you could easily damage them.
Now, at first glance,
it seemed like our Smart 600
was really able to dish out the power,
delivering a staggering 71 amps on the 12-volt rail
before it shut off.
That's nearly as much as our premium
Seasonic reference unit that costs over four times as much.
And at 12 volts, that would be 840 watts.
Man, you go, Thermaltake!
Except there's a small problem.
While it was delivering that 71 amps,
the Smart 600 here drops down to an appalling 8.6 volts
on the 12-volt rail.
That is so low that any real computer
that was connected to it would be off at best.
And it gets even worse.
Overpower protection is similar to overcurrent protection,
but is meant to protect the entire unit
when all the rails are loaded at the same time.
Now, the good news here is that overpower protection
did work on all of our units.
The bad news is that if overpower protection
only works one time, we consider that to be a fail.
And after tripping the overpower protection
on our Smart 600 watt, it never turned back on again.
You can pay your respects
by purchasing our new capacitor water bottle
on lttstore.com.
So I'd much rather take the 530 watts
that the EVGA BR450 was able to deliver,
knowing that if I ever did overload it,
it would be able to turn back on,
which earns it a link to buy down in the video description.
So, wow, Linus.
Good job.
The conclusion is to just buy from a reputable brand
like EVGA and then you're good to go, not so fast.
This is the EVGA 401.
And at first glance, it looks like a pretty good deal.
It's $40, so you'd probably expect it to be
basically a slightly less powerful 450 BR then.
But oh no, this one is a doozy.
To understand just why the 401 is so terrible,
we need to talk about power factor correction or PFC.
The power factor of a power supply
is the ratio of true power,
AKA the power that's being used to run your computer,
and apparent power,
which is how much power the electricity company
has to supply.
But wait, why would your utility company
have to supply extra power that you didn't use in your PC?
Ah, if your power supply has a bad power factor,
it's essentially pushing back
against the AC source from the wall.
So even though you didn't use that power,
the power company still had to deliver a bit extra
to compensate for your power supply
sending bad power back through the lines.
Typically, this is negligible,
since your power supply should overcome this
by having the current draw be in phase with the AC source.
But I bring all of this up
because the EVGA 401 has the worst power factor correction
that we've ever tested.
Every other unit we tested
had a power factor of nearly 0.99.
That means that 99% of the electricity that you're pulling
is being turned into useful work.
With the EVGA 401, the power factor is about 0.5.
To put real numbers to this,
with the Corsair SF450,
we've been using this one
to validate a lot of our test suite,
it was able to deliver 471 watts
while drawing 4.9 amps from the wall.
With the EVGA 401, it was able to do 427 watts
while it was drawing 9.3 amps from the wall.
Fortunately, in most residential settings,
you will only be charged for true power.
So this won't directly affect your energy bill,
but it is horribly inefficient for the power grid.
Making things even worse,
the AC to DC conversion efficiency of the 401
is also trash, coming in nearly 5% worse than the BR450.
As the cherry on top, after our overpower protection test,
the 401 never turned on again.
So there's some good news and some bad news here.
The bad news is you just can't trust
that manufacturers will highlight
the most relevant numbers on their boxes,
and you also can't trust that a reputable brand
will always be reputable.
The good news is that this means
that this was an excellent investment,
and there is so much more to come in the future.
We've only scratched the surface
of what our power supply tester is capable of.
Today, we focused on the basics,
like efficiency and safety protections,
because for budget power supplies,
that's what matters the most.
But as our test methodology improves,
so will the conclusions we'll be able to draw.
Telling who makes the best 1,000-watt 80-plus titanium
power supply, well, that's gonna come down
to much more subtle things,
like how solid is the 12-volt when you suddenly load it up?
Does the power supply introduce any noise into the circuit?
How about if the power is dirty in your region
or you experience frequent brownouts?
We've had many an overclock suddenly fail
when we arrive on set with lights
and a bunch of other stuff plugged in.
We did actually try out some of these tests
on our budget power supplies today,
and much like the rest of this video,
the Thermaltake Smart 600 and the EVGA 401 did horribly,
while the EVGA 450 BR did a pretty decent job.
But the details of all of that weren't terribly important
when two out of the three stopped working altogether.
And I'm jazzed, guys.
We are just a couple steps away
from being able to attach a power supply to this thing,
press go, and just bask in all the data and graphs
that will prove precisely who makes the best power supply
for your money.
I think the only thing more accurate
is this nanovolt-accurate segue to our sponsor.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
why don't you go check out how power supplies work?
Turbo nerd edition.
It'll give you a good foundation
to understand some of the upcoming content.