- In this box is a PCI express power filter card.
It claims to smooth out the dirty power from bad components
and improve the audio signals coming out of your PC.
And what we're going to do is we're gonna feed it
a worst case scenario
with a super cheap 1,000 watt power supply,
along with a very coil whiny graphics card
to see if it actually makes any appreciable difference
to sound quality.
My expectations, well, I wasn't born yesterday,
so pretty low.
Speaking of born yesterday, though,
I wrote a children's board book
and we just got our first set of mostly final samples.
So if you or anyone, you know, works for a bookseller
and wants to have the ABC's of gaming on your shelves
this holiday season for those little gamers
who are still too young
for a next gen console for Christmas,
contact us at Books@LTTstore.com
and we'll get the info you need to place your initial order.
(electronic music)
Before we can get into this card and what we expect,
we have to talk about power and how it's converted
from the main's AC power out of your wall
to the DC power that your hardware works with.
Most PCs today use what's called a switch mode
or switching power supply.
This is mostly because, compared to a linear power supply,
they are smaller, lighter, and more efficient.
A switching power supply can be as much as 80% smaller
and can have efficiencies as high as 96%
compared to the peak of around 60%
for a linear power supply.
But that doesn't mean that switching power supplies,
like this one, don't have any downsides.
And one of them is that they create more electrical noise.
If you've ever turned on a speaker
and heard a (electrical humming)
when no audio is being played,
that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Quote unquote, dirty power can rear its ugly head
from the external supply,
things like voltage spikes or lower unbalanced AC power,
like we have here in our building,
or even internally within the system
after the conversion to DC,
from components like graphics cards or other chips.
Now aficionados of high end audio
have tried a huge variety of ways
to mitigate this unwanted electrical noise
with varying levels of success.
One of the most common methods of noise suppression
is power conditioning,
where essentially you use a device
that takes the less than desirable power that it's given,
then acts as a buffer,
outputting a nice clean AC power signal
to sensitive audio hardware farther down the line.
If you watched our overview of the Abyss Diana headphones,
you may remember this monster of an amp tower.
This is the sort of thing
that has had plenty of forethought given to power delivery.
For example, where is it?
Where does it, there it is, ah!
- [Colin] Rip.
- Actually, it fell pretty flat, it's probably fine.
For example. (laughs)
For example, look at this plug here
with its bi-directional noise containment technology.
Thing is, most people don't have the $15,000
to buy an amp stack to power their speakers.
What if they just want to use a PC?
Well, that's where this, at least in theory, comes in.
meet the Elfidelity AXF-107 Magician,
a PCI express power purifying filter
fresh out of Shenzhen, China.
It's sports seven different capacitors,
seven different capacitors.
It's sports seven different capacitors.
And wouldn't you know it,
they even threw in a little bit of RGB for good measure.
Although, I'm only gonna give them half points for that
because to change the colors, you actually have to flip
these little dip switches here with a pin.
Now it claims to, and I quote here,
prevent video card coil wine and improve overclocking
as well as reduced noise floor
for an ultimate PC audio build spec.
That is quite the claim.
Wow.
You know, like if one $40 card
can create ultimate PC audio spec, I will be shocked.
just as shocked as it was to hear that
we've got a new shirt, check it out.
It's CPU pins. But if you look really close,
actually, if you look from far away,
it's got an LTT logo in it.
Up your geek street credit on LTTstore.com today.
Now to create the perfect storm of bad audio,
we grabbed Anthony's GPU test bench
and replaced the perfectly good Silverstone power supply
with the sketchiest one we had in the entire warehouse,
this $25 1,000 watt China special.
You're actually going to see this again, by the way,
assuming it survives the day,
in our upcoming Lennon PC build.
Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out.
While we were at it. We tossed in this
Sapphire nitro plus Radeon RX 590 special edition
for maximum coil whininess.
Even when this puppy is not doing anything.
Hear that crackling, that ticking.
Can you hear it?
- A little bit. - Yeah.
That's not even doing anything, David.
All right, let's start with a baseline
without our power filtering card in here.
Preloaded on this machine.
I've got a handful of lossless audio tracks,
ready to go and Grado's 420 edition headphones
as our reference cans to start with.
♪ Rise up from the ashes just like a phoenix ♪
I really need to move to flac for all my stuff.
Now, what I'd really love to have
is something with sort of quiet parts of the track,
so let me poke around a little bit here.
'Cause that's where you're going to be able to hear
that hiss or that higher noise floor.
While I'm listening, I'm gonna go ahead and run SPECviewperf
which is like a professional applications benchmark
that loads up both our CPU and GPU
to see if I hear any of that,
delightful buzzing through my headphones here.
Can you hear that wine now that we've actually loaded it up?
- [Colin] Yeah.
- I just, I can't make out any problem here.
To be clear, these are not
the most difficult headphones in the world to drive
so it's not a huge surprise to me
that the onboard audio on this motherboard
is able to drive them just fine.
And I'm not saying that if you didn't have
very high end audiophile headphones
you might not need a better audio solution.
It's just that that's not what we're testing for today.
Today we just want to know if this makes a difference
in a setup that someone might normally actually use.
So I dunno, maybe I'm gonna be blown away.
Let's throw the power filter card in
and see how we do here.
Something to note, guys,
that we didn't actually mention before
is this can be installed
either in a PCIE 1x slot or a 16x slot,
so you can insert your placebo however you like,
you just flip the bracket around
and install it the other way.
Where's my RGB at?
Oh, it's set to white.
Yeah, that's more work than I think it's worth to change.
I actually want to start with the simplest thing.
Just the test tone.
(digital fanfare)
And it's fine.
Fire up SPECviewperf I guess.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one thing
that we can determine,
like if it helps with the coil wine out of the GPU.
It's horrible.
Let's listen to those same tracks again now.
♪ Stand up together, stand up together ♪
- Still a good song.
Yup.
Wait, Rick Astley made it onto
this greatest hits of the 80s collection,
but not with "Never Gonna Give You Up"?
What even is that.
I dunno, so Colin prepared this video
and he wrote it as though there was no difference.
And I wanted to try real hard to find a difference
that he didn't detect but unfortunately I couldn't.
Not even in the coil wine of the system.
So, the question then is,
what made Elfidelity think that this was going to work?
Is there any scientific basis whatsoever
for why putting a PCI express card
into an entirely different slot
would have any impact on the DC power quality
of a graphics card that's over here in another slot
or a sound card that's built right into the motherboard?
You can actually see it down at the bottom there.
Well actually, people have been putting capacitors
and inductors and power lines to smooth out noisy signals
for a long time now.
LC filters are a perfect example of this principle
that are commonly used in drones to improve video quality,
which can be degraded by the electrical noise
caused by the motors and the ESCs,
particularly when they're rapidly changing speed.
So the principle is actually not stupid.
The problem is that you're limited
to just the things that this card can touch,
meaning that there's no impact on the PCI express connectors
that are going straight into your graphics card here.
And it also ignores that your sound card,
even an onboard one like this,
already has this kind of filtering built into it.
The thing is, the youngsters out there
might not remember this,
but there was a time when onboard audio was so bad
that a sound card was a pretty integral part
of any decent rig.
I can actually remember my first Sound Blaster
like it was yesterday, it was an Audigy 2 ZS
and it was night and day.
The difference was enough to put tears in your eyes,
like listening to the same songs.
It was huge.
So I'm not, poo-pooing the fundamental idea here.
It's just that we're looking at
yesterday's solution, tomorrow.
'Cause for the most part, those days are over
and onboard audio is good enough
for the value fast majority of people.
But wait, Linus, you might say, what about coil whine?
If it doesn't, oh, oh, that's funny.
Well, whatever we did this out of order,
we already checked that it doesn't help with that.
It's horrible.
So let's just conclude with this,
given that we used the noisiest parts
that we could find here in the studio
and didn't perceive any difference,
I wouldn't buy one of these.
Instead I would suggest
either investing in a decent power filter
or a power bar for your entire system
to eliminate ground loops and other noise,
not to mention improve the longevity of your power supply.
Or if that isn't in the cards,
maybe go pick up a digital analog converter
that sits outside of the PC itself,
like one of these units from FiiO.
By moving the signal processing out of the PC's case
to an external DAC and amp,
you're isolating it from the internal noise of your system.
And yeah, yes, I know,
some of it can still come through USB.
But there are options out there if you're that paranoid
to further reduce that potential crosstalk.
At the end of the day bottom line is,
a power filter isn't the first thing you should try
when it comes to improving the quality of your sound.
And if you're running such a bad motherboard
that you're getting hissing and crackling
from your headphones or speakers,
I think your $40 would probably be better spent
on a better motherboard
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By the way, if you guys enjoyed this video
and you want to learn a little bit more
about this setup here,
we actually collabed on this video with DMS.
He's a smaller YouTuber but he is super into this stuff
and very knowledgeable
so you can check out the video we did with him
and then maybe his channel.
(electronic music)