Ranting About Power Supply Myths, ft. Jonny Guru [Gamers Nexus]
Posted Apr 17, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC
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Still disappointed that Jonnyguru.com is dead. That was the gold standard for PSU reviews back in the day. Thankfully a lot of review sites have been doing a better job at reviewing PSU's since JG ended, but it was nice to have a dedicated PSU review site and community.
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I miss the "Death of Gutless Wonder" PSU reviews. It was always interesting to see how they could fail.
PSUs with characteristics such as:
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Fake or no certifications. Always a great sign.
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Circuit boards where it is obvious that there are missing components or they're smaller than what the silkscreen on the boards indicate.
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Violating ATX voltage regulation specs by feeding an alternating 11V to 13V to the 12V rails to fry the CPU/motherboard/GPU/etc when the PSU is only at 50% of its "rated capacity".
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Early 2000's or late 1990's PSU design rebadged as a new PSU model and thus over half of the PSU's capacity is in the 3.3V, -3.3V, 5V and -5.5V rails. Assuming the PSU's rated capacity was actually true and not overrated (very common among super cheap PSUs), that means a 400W PSU would actually only have 200W for the CPU, GPU and other components that use the 12V rail.
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A "1200W" PSU that was a rebadge of a previously reviewed "700W" PSU (because the circuit boards looked exactly the same), which that "700W" PSU itself was a rebadge of an okay performing 500W PSU because again the circuit boards were the same.
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Grounds could be easily broken and thus cause a shock hazard.
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Due to a hot spot, the PSU's circuit board would start to burn after just two hours of testing.
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A positive feedback loop temperature control. Because the fan was directly soldered to the circuit board, when temperature goes up -> resistance goes up -> current goes down -> fan slows -> temperature goes up -> repeat until PSU catches on fire
EDIT: On the positive side, there were also some exotic PSUs. Such as a 1200W watercooled PSU specifically designed for dual/triple GPUs, and if I recall correctly, it maintained a stable 12.00V on the 12V rail even under full load.
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On the positive side, there were also some exotic PSUs. Such as a 1200W watercooled PSU specifically designed for dual/triple GPUs, and if I recall correctly, it maintained a stable 12.00V on the 12V rail even under full load
Perfect! These might become mainstream for next gen i9KS and 4090ti series builds!
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FETs really don't need low temperatures to perform well.
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The electrolytic caps have their lifespan go up as temperature drops.
I can imagine a water cooled PSU’s caps lasting two decades under regular abuse.
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True. If they overheat, they just explode. Unless you count "exploding" as "not performing well".
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No. They need low temperatures to not explode.
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out of curiosity, what caused you to become a psu connoisseur?
for me it was in '97, and i lost the pet os i had been working on for 6-7 years when my cheap psu popped and took out my hdd, motherboard, cpu, and very expensive cd writer. i was in the process of backing up all my code on to cdr, too.
the hdd was completely fragged and even replacing the pcb couldn't recover it. i've run across a lot of ”dead” drives, but this one was dead.
pissed me off so much i took my computer to the railroad tracks behind my apartment complex and cut it into bits¹ with my sword and vowed i'd never touch a fucking overblown abacus again².
^^footnotes
1: more like chunks, dents, and some pieces. there were some cuts... but even a nice sharp hand forged and tempered blade can only do so much to a computer. the crt was especially gratifying :)
the freight train, however, took care of what my blade didn't.
2: i made it for just under six months, busking on the local touristy street when gig work and fill-ins for local bands weren't covering the bills.
then a short ronald reagan looking kid (i called everyone a kid back then, even though he was in his 20's and married) who also lived in the complex and heard from someone else in the complex that i wrote ”assembly code” had an idea for a startup, had some vc lined up, and sold 10,000 licenses to the big company he worked at. what he didn't have was a product or anyone to make it...
... so i ended up in yet another weird startup writing code for rapid os and software deployment. think doing a 20,000 computer rollout over a novell netware network and being able to fresh install (or upgrade) every machine to windows 95/nt, slackware, or ms/dr-dos plus the correct set of drivers, software, and site-specific customizations with nothing but two techs and a weekend...
... this startup lasted a couple of years before it died. we had our own offices, nice furniture, a somewhat decent test lab, a small team of hand picked code ninjas, and a phat network to play quake on, with huge 21” viewsonic p815 crts, matrox agp gpus, and hella overclocked p2 cpus :) fun times!
plus i could get pretty much whatever parts i wanted under the ”testing lab” budget.
we had full page ads in magazines, interviews with various media outlets, and were looking at putting up a booth for computex³ at the jacob k. javits in nyc the following year... hell, we got invited to speak!
it really looked like it was going somewhere.
but, like most things, it died. unlike jesus, it didn't rise from the dead after fighting satin for souls (although quake was close) and make it back in time to have a totally-not-a-pagen-spring-fertility-celebration easter dinner :(
3: it's probably not computex now that i think about it. it was held at the end of june every year in new york city at the jacob k. javits... and i could never remember its name back then, either. it was a conference larger companies made highbrow releases and was the counterpoint to the chaos of las vegas' comdex.
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I'm not who you were responding to, but I was a tech around that time (mid to late 90s). I did a lot of the onsite work as well as instore repair. Cheap parts, at least back then, were not worth using. It wasn't just outright failure, but flakiness.
The absolute worst brand I ever ran across was JTS hard drives. The store I worked at used them on our cheapest whitebox line for at most 2 months. I'd say 80%+ of those drives failed within the year, many within months or even weeks. Every brand had bad models, but those things took the cake. Holy shit, they were garbage.
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It was my impression at that time that Windows crashed so often that H/W manufacturers could put out crap systems and blame instability on Windows.
Wasn't that also the time when some manufacturers shipped motherboards with fake CPU cache or was that in the 80s? (The first '86 CPU cache was not on the processor itself.)
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Same, I own an EVGA G3 850W Gold because of that site and true to their word it's held up magnificently through many upgrades.
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I got the G2 because of it.
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Still rocking my 850 G2, granted this the replacement. First one had an issue with overcurrent protection kicking in, for seemingly no reason at all (at the time I had a 4790k and GTX 970) even under no load it would randomly just power down.
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Ehh I wouldn’t call the current situation "a lot of review sites have been doing a better job". It’s actually one guy doing bunch of reviews for various tech sites. The guy's Aris uhh.. something. Forgive me as I can't remember or dare to pronunce that Greek demigod's name. So just like JonnyGuru, if this guy retires idk what the PSU review landscape will look like.
Fortunately Aris founded Cybernetics, an alternative to "80+" certification. And quite a bunch of PSU companies have started using his certification. So I think he shouldn’t have monetary issues to ditch reviewing and join a big company.
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Checkout the PSU reviews at TPU. They're a good replacement.
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Yep, absolutely. The shear number of units tested was awesome too, even different wattages of the same model/family.
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I vaguely remember one review where the reviewer liked the psu so much he populated the entire article with double entendres
I can't find it anymore though
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written reviews seem almost dead tbh. But these days the risk of buying a bad bad PSU is very small.
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But these days the risk of buying a bad bad PSU is very small.
Coughs Gigabyte's exploding PSUs and pressuring retailers such as Newegg to bundle them with other products, then insulting Gamers Nexus when confronted about it coughs
https://kotaku.com/gigabyte-will-replace-exploding-psus-takes-shot-at-med-1847491215
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Yeah, wasn't even that long ago when Microcenter was selling those shit Diablotek PSUs. These days I don't think they sell anything that isn't 80+ rated. (I know, not a good quality indicator on its own but certainly weeds out some of the worst brands)
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I still use a Diablotek case for the lil ARK server box in the other room
Honorable mentions are the nearly unremovable front fan that's completely obstructed (and basically just there for the LED's installed into it) and 2/3 of the front USB ports are dead
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A knowledgeable, honest and nice guy. Corsair definitely snatched the right talent.
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Jonny Guru? Now that's a name I hadn't heard in a long time.
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Short and yet so much good info in here! Didn't know Corsair had standardized on type 4 cables, something like that I'd want to know as a consumer. Always wondered about the scope of the fake FDB issue...
Thanks JonnyGuru!
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short? 21 minute video?
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Short-ish for Gamers Nexus
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Was partly meaning I would happily watch an hour of interesting info like this, especially from JonnyGuru. Good technical breakdowns & behind-the-scenes info like this vid are both such a rarity these days.
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Jonny is great. However, no manufacturers will meet up in a room to make a standard. Intel has already tried, NVIDIA has also initiated a cable standard. The day the 24 changes will hurt the consumer. edit: we also need to move away from the idea of wattage as a whole - having 1000w does not mean your PSU will deliver the power to your system. capacity does not = performance.
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On the contrary, ATX12VO 2.0 will greatly help the consumer.
Aside from the increased efficiency, PSUs are specified to handle large, brief power spikes above their long-term rating, and the 12VO connector adds the I_PSU% signal, which lets the PSU warn the CPU when it's overloaded. The CPU can throttle very briefly to avoid tripping the overpower protection. That way you don't need a greatly oversized PSU to prevent your computer from randomly shutting down when the GPU and CPU have power spikes at the same time.
Instead of a 450 W system needing a 750 W PSU, with 750 W of bus capacitors and 750 W of semiconductors and 750 W of cooling, you should be able to use a 550 W PSU with 750 W of capacitors, 650 W of semiconductors, and 550 W of cooling.
This was discussed by Stephen Eastman of Intel in an interview with the Full Nerd podcast..
Right-size the 3.3 and 5V converters. Right-size the PSU itself. The whole system becomes cheaper.
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What's the difference between a G3 and a G5 power supply?
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G2
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MATHS! But seriously, I'm guessing it's a "generation" label, 5 being the newest, but who really knows I guess....
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Correct, just a generation moniker in this case. I think their most recent line is G6.
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G2/P2/T2 were rebranded Superflower psu's that already had awesome reputation, no idea on the newer ones.
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Do we need to push power efficiency of PSU's more? Its very much diminishing returns beyond 90%. Id rather they focus on making other parts of the PSU better (which Johnny guru talks about in the video) and not focusing on making it 1% more efficient.
At an 800w load (very high end graphics and OC'd CPU) the difference between gold rated 88% efficiency and titanium rated 91% is about 20w of power drawn from the wall. Its not a meaningful difference (again this is at full load on a very high end system running very high power draw software).
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The 2% & 10% load efficiency, sleep states, and on/off cycles of current power supplies are fairly bad and not measured by 80+. ATX 4.0 allows for that which is a major improvement.
Efficiency when gaming or running at load is good, but so is when your browsing, using Word, or idling. The new CA rules also will require this for SI's and others.
Getting rid of the 3/5V rails would also help since they mostly serve no purpose except for phantom draw, but that seems to have less inertia.
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80+ measures 10% load for Titanium ratings iirc. Otherwise I agree with everything you said.
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10% of 650W is easily 2x the idle power of even older machines with ATX-legacy multi-rail PSUs, as long as they use integrated graphics. The lowest I could get my z87 Haswell was 36 W from the wall, and that's with a group-regulated 80+ bronze PSU.
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How much would you pay up front for that 20W lower over 5-10 years of a PSUs life
Rule of thumb is that in most of the continental US, 1 W for 1 year at 100% duty cycle costs $1. Of course, desktop PCs aren't anywhere close to 100% duty cycle, but idle power does become very important, and electricity costs in Europe/California/Hawaii are 2-3X higher.
It's enough to be worth checking the math, even if it doesn't always come out in favor of the most efficient PSU. And you should certainly set your idle screen blank timeout and S3 sleep timeout (if your PC doesn't run any servers) to low-ish values.
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Titanium peak is 91% at full load, 96% at half load. In the800w example it would be peak efficient at 400w and the difference would be even less than 20w.
All else being equal it is not worth paying extra for those few watts saving.
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I much prefer Seasonic PSU, than Corsair ones
Much less problems with Seasonic
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Corsair has Seasonic as the oem for some of their PSU.
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Had*
Corsair ditched them for various reasons
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Seasonic prime titanium series is where it's at. You can run 3 overclocked graphics cards on it, and it doesn't even get warm, or you can shut the fan off and it will operate in passive cooling mode.
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My corsair is a seasonic. I bought the corsair branded version because it had a longer warranty.
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Only PSU which gave issues to me was a Seasonic.
Corsair has never given an iota of issue to me.
Seasonic pci cables are 18AWG, Corsairs are 16AWG. Seasonic for budget builds for me, for anything with more power Corsair all the way.
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Nice to see JG, the OG of PSU testing. In the same vein, I wonder what Oklahoma Wolf is upto these days?
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Still around! https://www.youtube.com/user/Oklawolf
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A pleasant surprise to see Jonny Guru, hopefully part of why GN is there is to get some of that magic Jonny had for his reviews (even if they don't push out nearly as many PSU reviews).
I honestly think Jeremy Schrag (Oklahoma Wolf, Oklawolf on reddit) is probably more memorable from JG, in part because of his writing style, and in part because Jon left in 2007(?) (Word Meister Schrag left in end 2018.)
It's true enough that Oklahoma Wolf did more reviews than Jonny himself on his site before too long, haha. I was always under the impression Jonny kicked off the format and the other review contributors just ran with it, but I don't have anything concrete to base that off of so I can't say anything either way.
If tech jesus ever breaks into song while reviewing a PSU Oklawolf's definitely involved.
Hopefully we start seeing techtubers competing on this kinda thing too, with any luck we'll see every LTT video being delivered entirely in limerick form by 2025.
You shouldn't give the world's biggest Falco fan ideas like that.
The "vibe" of the site was always "pre-defined". Jeremy or Jon, the reviews always had the same snarky humor. Which is why it worked so well.
Old Jon reviews rescued from the sites demise:
http://jongerow.com/jonnyguru/SilencerMkIII600W/index.htm
http://jongerow.com/jonnyguru/XFXPro450/index.html
Man, the last time I saw that name was 2005 in the OCforums. Wonder if he still field dresses terrible PSUs.
Jonny's PSU reviews were amazingly informative and helped educate me on a lot of things. Hell of a guest.
Just to be clear - the guest is the namesake for the site, but left about 15 years ago. The actual reviewer for the JG website from about 2007 through end of 2018 was OklahomaWolf.
Tony/Tazz also did a few but much less prolific than Oklawolf.
There are jonny reviews from 2011, so I'm not sure where the 2007 number came from. Though it's hard to pull a lot of the reviews from archive.org.
I was disappointed, more so because I hoped it would be better, and because gn hasn't been putting out good stuff for a while that I've seen, but I didn't really see anything very interesting, stuff about modular cables that didn't really go anywhere, something about some new trend in slapping big heatsinks apparently over the cooling exhaust of power supplies or something being a bad idea because you're slapping something over the exhaust of your psu or something, beating the same dead horse on the psu efficiency ratings being about efficiency, not psu quality. The full/half bridge rectifier was interesting but boiled down to it doesn't matter you have to look at the quality of the components, and then the bit about how, if you're trying to replace a psu fan with a quieter one, you need to match static pressure... And I guess them saying that if a psu has a cybernetics badge on it to check the cybernetics review, don't buy it blindly...
I guess maybe it was more interesting to other people.
I thought our Newegg series and the 5 CPU reviews we just published inside of a week were pretty good. We also did the budget PSU round-up, that was new for us. The air cooler reviews have been more in-depth than ever and we have one from just 4 weeks ago. The Microcenter video was fun and different.
If you have a better idea of what 'quality' should be from us, please feel free to share a few examples.
We have a lot of videos going up -- maybe you're just not getting the ones you like served to you via YT. That happens sometimes.
Hey, not OP here. Really cool to me that you were able to interview Jonny and hope there's opportunity for more with him! I think unfortunately a lot of the additional stuff I'd like to hear about is probably under the discretion of Corsair to allow it at this point. Such as talking about the early history of his site, more details of the daily in/out that he does at Corsair, and possibly some upcoming/future stuff that Corsair is working on with PSUs (Like the mentioning "Model 5"). Maybe something Corsair had to overcome in the last two years on the supply side, maybe not if people are sick of that topic in general lol. Also my own question, do multiple rails still even matter? With 600w GPUs, crypto mining, and threadrippers, are there any tangible benefits to a third rail? Maybe this is basically parallel to what you guys are talking about with the half/full bridge conversation.
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So it looks like a month ago you covered the new amd releases in one vid, and then have been putting out followup vids. Generally, on the face of that, that's good, and it makes sense.
So, like, the 5800x3d vid, I'm guessing it's roughly the same as every other vid on it that's been released...
On the positive side, I assume you're covering a larger number of recent games, so, say a fortnite player will really know how it does at fortnite, or destiny 2, or whatever...
Somehow I don't think you cover things like the cost of the s1700 platform, the difference in system design and system cost for a ~150W cpu versus a ~250W+ cpu, the difference in RAM considerations for a 5800x3d versus the ram considerations for a 12900ks, how they do with jedec 3200 at jedec timings, how they do with, say, that cheap corsair ddr4 3000 overclocked to 3600-3800 on am4 or close to 4000 on s1700, how they do with, say, 3600cl18, versus, say, 4000cl14 gear one versus, say, gear 2 4600+, and boiling that down to, say, a ~5 min segment of the video, in, maybe, a larger, say, ~10-15 min segment comparing the two platforms, going back to, say, what the heatsink, and case considerations are...
What happens if, say, someone puts a 12900ks in a poorly designed case?
Or if someone runs a 12900ks in, say, an asrock b660m-hdvp/d5?
What if they run it in a sff case with bad cooling?
Then, a clickbait vid about the 4500 that rightfully AFAIK lauds intels low end for good performance and reasonable prices... probably ignoring the cost of the s1700 platform
A clickbait vid about how the 5800x should have been ~$30 cheaper?
A clickbait vid about the 5500 again probably ignoring the price of the s1700 platform, but, again, fair dues, that 12100 seems to be the only reason for s1700 to exist.
A vid on the g7400, the ~$150($165) 2c companion to the ~$200 12100 (add $100 for the minimum cost of s1700)... huh, 2022... the year of the 2c/4c... who knew... How far does half a 12100 get you? I guess it must be pretty far.
And overall, good to call out newegg, even better if you can get them to improve their rma.
But I don't see any vid I'd be interested in watching.
The title does a good job keeping expectations in check here I think. I wouldn't expect super deep dive when discussing common myths like these and this kind of thing hadn't been covered before so it's good this is out there in video by a reliable source now.
I'm really hoping things go further in future videos based on the interaction with Jonny here but that will have to be seen, I doubt they met up with him just for this piece.