**A Critical Review of the OCZ 850W Power Supply**

Our team at Gamers Nexus has been testing the OCZ 850W power supply, and we must say that our experience has been underwhelming. The power supply's marketing claims that it is an 80+ Gold certified product, but after conducting extensive tests, we found that this claim is not only inaccurate but also misleading.

During our testing process, we encountered several issues with the power supply. One of the most notable problems was that the protection mechanism seemed to work without exploding prematurely. While this may seem like a positive aspect at first glance, it actually indicates that the power supply's design is flawed and prone to catastrophic failures. We also observed that the fan bearing did not match the marketing claims, which raises questions about the manufacturer's attention to detail.

Despite our best efforts to find something positive to say about the power supply, we were unable to do so. The tests we conducted revealed that the product was well below par in terms of performance and quality. We cannot recommend this power supply to anyone, regardless of their needs or budget.

In fact, if we had to reclassify the power supply based on our tests, we would say that it is more accurately represented as an 80+ Bronze certified product. While this may seem like a minor distinction, it highlights the significant gaps between the manufacturer's claims and the actual performance of the product.

The question we asked Patrick, our resident expert in power supplies, was whether he would feel comfortable recommending this product to our audience. His response was candid: "I wouldn't even call it a good power supply." We couldn't agree more.

**A Power Supply for Budget-Conscious Buyers?**

While we cannot recommend the OCZ 850W power supply for any serious use cases, there may be some scenarios where it is suitable for budget-conscious buyers. If you only need to power a basic PC or a low-end gaming system, this power supply might be sufficient. However, if you're planning to overclock your system or use high-power consuming components, we would strongly advise against using this product.

**What Went Wrong?**

So, what went wrong with the OCZ 850W power supply? To answer this question, we need to understand how the manufacturer's testing and quality control processes failed. In our experience, it seems that the power supply was not thoroughly tested before being released to market. The lack of attention to detail in terms of fan bearing matching and protection mechanism design is staggering.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our experience with the OCZ 850W power supply has been a resounding disappointment. While we appreciate the manufacturer's efforts to create a high-quality product, their execution falls woefully short. We cannot recommend this product to anyone, regardless of their needs or budget.

**Recommendations for Future Power Supply Testing**

As we continue to test and review power supplies in our series, we have several recommendations for improving our methodology:

* Adding more tests to ensure comprehensive performance evaluation

* Improving data presentation to make complex information more accessible to our audience

* Developing behind-the-scenes content that provides insight into the testing process and equipment used

We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we appreciate the support of our audience in helping us achieve this goal.

**Supporting Our Content**

If you enjoyed this review and would like to see more power supply tests, please consider supporting our content by visiting our sponsor links or joining our Patreon community. We offer exclusive behind-the-scenes videos, early access to new content, and other perks for our patrons. Thank you for your support!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engenerally speaking there are two great ways to sell a product one of them is to make a good product and the other one is to just make things up and tell everyone that you did the first this is was the aries game ags 850. it's one of the top selling power supplies on amazon right now it's an 850 watt model it is cheap at 70 on sale right now up to 90 typically and that made us a little bit skeptical of it there's this very common and sort of lazy perception that just buying an 80 plus gold power supply is generally a safe bet or that this is the main way you determine the quality of a power supply but if gigabyte hadn't already taught us this this power supply might help further prove that that platitude isn't always the correct uh path to take so we're gonna be looking at the aries game 850. before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so at the time of writing this power supply was 70 it's again typically about 90 at the max and the next closest competitor at the time of writing was 114 80 plus gold power supplies of 850 watts are typically closer to an average of 150 between amazon and newegg for us sellers and our objective with this review was genuinely getting into it after we sorted top power supplies on amazon was to figure out if it actually is that insanely good of a deal or if something else is going on with it this is actually the sixth best reviewed 850 watt power supply on amazon in totality and it's the 14th best reviewed power supply overall regardless of the wattage so that's a pretty high up ranking so we've got a weird one with this one because this power supply claims 80 plus gold it plasters it everywhere it's got it on the sticker on the power supply on at least three sides actually has it on the box these are stickers that will remain on them until all existing inventory moves through uh it claims 80 plus gold on retail websites like amazon it says it on the official aries game website and it says it in the manuals and other documentation so this power supply leans very heavily on being a cheap 80 plus gold power supply that's clearly the selling point and ultimately uh it's not 80 plus gold we were unable to verify the 80 plus gold claims in fact the manufacturer verified our verification that we couldn't verify the claims and so this is a problem because it's not anywhere close to 80 plus gold and people are buying it because of that because it's one of the easiest things to do for a system builder who doesn't really have the means to understand a power supply we don't blame you uh to just pick 80 plus gold as a safety net as a this is probably fine right that's a fairly high rating but as a reminder 80 plus it's just an efficiency rating it doesn't mean it's safe to use it doesn't mean it's good it doesn't test the protection mechanisms like scp ocp ovp or whatever the part where the review gets weird though is that we had to shoot it twice we shot the whole review and uh then in the process of editing it and working on it eventually we did get a response from aries game as normal way of course we normally reach out to a manufacturer when our findings greatly dispute to theirs to try and understand why that might happen sometimes the answer is very simple it's very very commonly the answer is they were lying but other times there might be a misunderstanding or we've discovered something that they were unaware of and these are important things to try and clarify before we publish obviously because we have responsibility to both parties although our primary concern is for consumers either way they did eventually reply and we've accidentally affected some change not all of what we want to see with this product but some of it ahead of the review launching where are's game has now started pulling down so the 80 plus gold claims and instead replaced it with just a simple 80 plus certification we'll come back to this efficiency chart in a little bit in more detail but our findings were very simple in nature although the power supply passed our protection testing meaning it didn't explode so it did better than gigabyte oh it also did not meet the claims of b and 80 plus gold and you can see that in this plot the ags 850 was actually below 80 plus bronze in our testing borderline 80 plus white label meaning below bronze and other aspects left much to be desired as well but for what it's worth we didn't encounter any catastrophic failures sadly that's more of a mark of quality today than it should be it is however short of the marketing claims in trying to give aries game a fair chance to respond to our findings and explain itself we received this answer from them quote our team lab tested again the samples left in the factory we found some samples reached gold and some samples did not reach gold and you were right about the ones that did not reach gold that was weirdly easy and non-confrontational doesn't normally work like that and we weren't really sure what to do with ourselves after that it actually took several days to completely rework the script and fig that's not we don't go into a potential conflict like that expecting resolution or expecting a reply at all and to be clear there's not resolution yet they haven't done what they really need to do and we'll get to that in the conclusion of this review to talk about what really needs to be done but uh if we give aries game the benefit of the doubt it seems like maybe they're open to doing the right thing even if it's because they saw our gigabyte testing and became afraid of it but uh it was just it threw us off plainly is uh is all we can really say about it normally we get a reply like no you although this was a move in the right direction and we'll go through all the testing too is the important part though the the product was still entirely marketed on a premise which as far as we can tell and they've now somewhat verified was a false premise it's marketed on something that is objectively untrue uh these are numbers they're very easy to prove or disprove because that's what they are it's sort of what you do with numbers so at best it's misleading it's maybe disingenuous intentionally or not and it's definitely worth condemnation to mismarket a product on things that are not reflective of reality what we can't know for sure is whether this was skullduggery or whether it was aries game making a genuine mistake aries game and defending itself said while the components have changed kovit has made it hard to get certain components and so we've changed the parts that are used to assemble the psu and that's why the rating is different if they're going through that many changes that the rating might change 480 plus they should resubmit the power supply sample and probably make a new sku so we're not forgiving them for what's happened here because there are ways to deal with it and they involve submitting another sample getting testing and finding out that you can't call it 80 plus gold anymore but that's an undesirable result so probably they tried to avoid it we don't have enough of a history with aries game thus far to judge if it wants to do the right thing or if it's afraid of a gigabyte scenario but either way aresgame asked us what it was we were after and we said that the marketing should be in line with reality we explained that especially with a western audience being truthful about a decent 80 plus bronze power supply won't hurt them but potentially lying or being perceived as line about an 80 plus gold one which isn't will hurt them ares game told us that it had updated the amazon page it thanked us for some of the information on western markets and that was more or less the end of the conversation as it stands now updating the amazon page to get rid of the 80 plus gold claims is the right direction but there's a few problems with this one of them these the listing remains and so this should really be a different sku because what they're doing is co-opting their own listing with what is functionally a new product benefiting from all the page rank the search rank on amazon it's very hard to accumulate uh and running underneath that product the whole list of pre-existing user reviews for something which this is at this point no longer so that's part of the problem with doing it that way another problem is that users who have already purchased this potentially have one like ours we bought this retail so you might have something if you bought it that is not as advertised that's a problem additionally any existing reviews references and build guides videos whatever will be linking back to a page which was once marketed as one thing gold and is now listed as another thing 80 plus blank so it's not a fix it's a band-aid what ares game needs to do is create a new listing but anyway let's get into the real testing and start talking about some of the numbers now that we've gotten through the bulk of the efficiency stuff that's really where the potential scandal was how they deal with it in the next week or so is really what's going to dictate what happens to this product but we can at least talk about if it's worth it if we ignore the 80 plus factor the rest of the power supply's marketing is pretty convincing it makes bold claims like stable supply less spend get one win all and gamer's partner gaming's mate and although it's fun and easy to make fun of marketing like this the power supply also has some maybe more impressive claims it claims it offers a 10-year warranty with fairly standard coverage for the most part which remains competitive at the price if you can trust aries game to stick around that long we're not saying that as an undeserved dig at aries game it's just a statement of reality it was started last year it's a sub brand of a major oem that claims it has been around for 15 years now the company also makes a lofty claims about its performance aries game says it can achieve the highest possible overclock it also plainly claims 90 efficiency at 115 volt ac which is a number we can actually put to the test this power supply does actually have an 80 plus report so it's not like they just took the sticker and put it on there which you could also do uh from what we can tell it appears as if there's an actual clear result result for the power supply being 80 plus gold now as for how that happens if it is in fact not 80 plus gold there's really two main ways one would be a company submitting potentially a fraudulent sample which was designed to pass certain bars with no intent of selling it that way we're not saying that's what happened here but that is one of the two main ways this could happen the other way is maybe they had a golden sample wherein the power supply happened to test extremely good it came from a particularly good batch that would never be created again or is created rarely and that could also get a high rating that is then applied to every power supply even the ones that don't do as well because maybe they use lower tier components for key issues we'll be talking about obviously there's the efficiency angle we'll also be going over the noisy output signals the load regulation sort of inadequacies that we discovered where it was just not great voltage ripple is pretty high we observed significant voltage variance from the lowest end of the tested loads to the heaviest loads that we tested and additionally we're a bit suspicious about the claims of the bearing that's in this fan as well it goes that low level now it's possible you could get this unit for 50 to 70 percent of the price of a competitor's actually 80 plus gold actually has the bearing it claims power supply at 850 watts you might decide the benefit there outweighs the shortcomings in terms of the cost benefit from this versus not technically being what it's claiming we didn't have a catastrophic failure so as we've tested it we haven't seen anything that causes us a safety concern other than maybe being just generally concerned about what else might be wrong with it but if you're willing to trade off the fact that it's not truly 80 plus gold for the fact that it's cheap well it's still something for you to consider buying but that's entirely on you at that point uh you have agency here you should be the one making that decision if which of those things you value higher than the other the money or buying the product that is represented the way it actually exists speaking strictly for ourselves uh patrick stone and i have the same view on it which is that with the power delivery component once there's a significant call to question of the integrity of the claims there's just there's enough other options there where we feel a little bit uncomfortable using it in one of our computers but again we haven't actually discovered a catastrophic failure it's more of just a general concern and you can ignore that if you'd like it's up to you time to get into some of the numbers for this we're still adding to our power supply testing it's relatively new to our test suite overall so there's still stuff we'd like to add later but we have a pretty well rounded suite at this point so let's get started for a bit of component analysis on this psu we're just going to kind of open it up sort of tear down style it's already been disassembled again please always be cautious when working with psus we don't recommend anyone open or work on them unless you absolutely know what you're doing this particular one has been discharged and we know that there's no charge left in this thing at all the modular connectors have no filtering around them which uh usually on power supplies you're going to see a few filtering caps around here but in this case they chose to put the filtering caps all on the main pcb if we look at where the power comes in the emi transient filter is pretty normal nothing too crazy going on here there is one thing that is missing on this section generally in addition to having a fuse here for voltage protection there's what's called an mov or a metal oxide varistor and there is not one on this psu which means that if you happen to get voltage surges then your psu could could go out and possibly parts inside your computer could be affected as well so if you are using this unit we do recommend that you get a surge protector or a ups unit which that's just good practice anyway as we go past the filter we hit the rectifiers here these turn the ac to dc for us and then from the rectifiers we go to the active power factor correction area over here in the active power factor correction area we have a couple of caps here and these caps are by cap exxon get a little shot of that right there these guys are 270 microfarad 420 volt and there's a pair of them here so we get microfarad total um not not exactly super strong for bolt caps could have probably done a little bit more but what we're going to see as we go through this thing is that they've they've kind of bargain selected some of the components as we move from the apfc we then go back to the other side of this thing and just inside between the transformer and on the inside of this heatsink you can see there is a what looks like a diode or in this case it's a transistor and there's a pair of them there these guys are set up in what's called a double forward converter configuration usually what we're used to seeing is an llc converter for this part of the power supply and this double forward is known to be less efficient and again we're going to see that when we look at the numbers on efficiency in just a minute as we go across from there we get the main transformer the transformer then uh dumps us over to the rectification for the outputs and uh we have the 12 volt rectification and then over here on this little board we've got 3.3 volt and 5 volt rectification and then we have output filtering caps all around the area here the output filtering caps are from a company named jsh for these conductive polymers and we couldn't find any information on those at all um and then we found some asia x capacitors here and here uh there are four of the taller ones and two of the smaller ones the asia x caps like other components aren't the best for for uh selection and then if we look at the 3.3 volt and the 5 volt we run into a brand named x-con and then i don't know if we can even get down this there's a another one in addition to this solid polymer cap there are there are four like this one on the bottom and the x-cons are up here and the four on the bottom again are jsh on the output filtering the capacitor selection leaves something to be desired and that that i think you're going to see that is going to come to bear and all the testing that none of the numbers look great there is an ntc thermistor and usually this guy has an associated relay with it and there is no relay on this particular power supply and that relay helps to boost efficiency after the power supply has already started up so just one more thing that's kind of missing on this psu back to my side to talk about efficiency for a bit so the ags 850 again it's advertised 80 plus gold it's possible that the unit sent to clear result the custodian for the 80 plus standard tested to that standard they do have it listed it is an issued certificate everything looks about as legit as it can look from clear result side so it's possible that it worked but based on the quality of the internal components and the performance of the unit in our testing it's unlikely that the units in circulation will perform to that level we bought this retail our sample certainly didn't anyway at 10 load the unit tested at clear results reported 86.23 while our sample from amazon came in at about five percentage points lower at 81.8 percent for efficiency at 10 percent at 20 load the officially submitted unit registered 89.98 efficiency in our comparable tests the power supply only delivered 85.8 efficiency these numbers might not sound like big differences but they are literally the tiers of 80 plus efficiency ratings that's the entire point of them and not much separates one from the next at least numerically the next marker for 80 plus is 50 load the clear result test noted an efficiency of 91.26 and the gn unit only hit in our testing 87.4 percent big difference the final checkpoint for 80 plus is 100 load and here the sample submitted by aries game registered 89.01 efficiency our lab tests we saw considerably lower results at 81.8 percent efficiency comparing the two graphs it's easy to see that there's a discrepancy if our testing results here are representative of the whole then the end result is that this power supply as it stands here only qualifies for 80 plus white label meaning not even bronze if we account for margin of error and for differences in devices chroma versus the sun moon for example uh perhaps if we're being generous we'll say that it's basically 80 plus bronze in fact that's we'll we'll just go ahead and say it's pretty close to 80 plus bronze and perhaps with the exact same testing rig we could draw that line but it's certainly not 80 plus gold even with device differences now on this content we worked with a couple of power supply engineers in the industry to cross-validate uh as you do when you're trying to do good science and they found similar results to ours they found also about 80 plus bronze plus or minus a little bit into the white label territory and ultimately it's pretty simple the only way to get prices lower like this unit is to sacrifice quality and that's what's happened here as for load regulation as noted earlier we don't have anything on transient response yet but we do have some stability information to share the voltage regulation at different loads saw amounts of variance beyond our desired specifications preferably we'd like to see less than two percent variation on all rails except for the 12 volt rail for 12 volts we consider less than one percent to be ideal on 12 volts we had 1.8 percent difference between our highest and lowest loads not quite up to our standards for 5 volts our test yielded a 2.6 difference coming in very close to our standard at 3.3 volts we tallied a 4.2 percent difference and on the 5 volt standby rail our tests registered 3.2 percent difference if we're aiming for a 2 variation on these rails then those numbers don't make the cut the other piece of stability information we have is the data on voltage riffle here we take a look at not only the ripple that remains from ac to dc conversion but also the noise surrounding the ripple almost any power supply is going to meet the intel multi-rail desktop power supply design guide specifications which ask for a maximum of 120 millivolts peak to peak on 12 volts and 50 millivolts peak to peak on 5 volts 5 vsb and 3.3 volts this guide is kind of ridiculous it's very out of date those numbers are maybe suitable for a super cheap oem build that doesn't use enthusiast class parts but the tolerances should be tightened for what most people on our channel are likely going to use our standards are considerably higher we want to see a 30 millivolt peak to peak and 25 millivolt peak to peak being our respective goals for those voltages we have leeway up to 80 millivolts for worse or bad power supplies that might not be powering heavy overclocks but ares game does explicitly mention in its manual and advertising that overclocking to the peak is part of its goal that means it needs to be closer to the stricter side like most power supplies voltage ripple on this unit got worse as we increase the load at 100 load the 12 volt rail stayed within intel spec at 98 millivolts but was woefully outside of our expectations all three of the other rails at 5 volts 3.3 volts and 5 vsb missed intel standard mark registering 58 52 and 74 millivolts respectively these numbers were also outside of our desired measurements as you'd expect because they're more strict this appears to be a simple case of component quality voltage ripple can be reduced with better components and tighter design requirements neither of which we're seeing in the review of this power supply moving over to the cooling fan it's a 140 mm cooling fan when we open this thing up to check the claims on the box the box said this is a hydraulic bearing fan so we decided we would go ahead and take out this little piece right here that which is basically a rubber stopper and then some uh clips that hold it in place and just sort of pull this apart just to check out if we could see anything look like hydraulic bearings and what we found instead was what basically looks like a sleeve bearing um so one more thing about the power supply where it says one thing and isn't exactly that on the protection testing we haven't quite gotten the whole suite mentioned in the atx multi-rail desktop power supply design guide covered but we're making progress for this unit we added scp or short circuit protection testing and we hope to be able to add otp testing next with ovp and uvp following afterwards let's see what patrick found for scp we took advantage of some built-in functionality on the sm8800 we were able to verify that every connector on the ags 850 responded correctly to short circuit protection by simply clicking these blue buttons here each one of them tests a different connector and when you hear that click that creates a short and the power supply should shut down in testing ocp we saw trip points that range from 112 on the plus 12 volt rail to 149 percent on the plus 5 volt rail the plus 3.3 volt rail had a similar trip point to the plus 5 volt rail at 146 percent while the plus 5 vsb rail tripped at 126 we'd like to see the trip points for the plus 5 and plus 3.3 volt lowered to be more in line with the plus 12 volt if area's game makes a second addition of this unit permitting the opp limit to reach 150 percent is too high we're hopeful that the units in circulation are more like the one we tested our unit trip wpp at 938.5 watts or about one hundred and ten point four percent that's a desirable obp value that's thankfully nowhere near under fifty percent a couple small positive notes to re-emphasize here so aries game did have good youtube documentation and a good starter guide that's actually a great effort to see some materials to help new builders more likely their audience anyway so we did like seeing some of the guides and we didn't have any problem with the ones that we saw we also liked that the protection seemed to work without exploding preemptively that's always a good sign so they are doing well there no catastrophic failures ripple and regulation were sub-optimal for oc but technically everything is kind of okay as long as it's marketed properly if this is marketed as 80 plus white label or bronze it pretty much resolves the issues we've had with it although they do need to make sure the fan bearing matches the marketing as well we ultimately need to see a new listing for this entirely on amazon because it's basically a new sku if they do launch a bronze or a white label one and we would want to see a resolution for customers who thought they bought 80 plus gold and ended up with something else although amazon will probably reinforce you there unfortunately amazon likely just throws a lot of this stuff straight in the trash once it gets a return if our tests again are indicative of the products in circulation then that's bad uh it's line at that point to call this 80 plus gold because that is factually inaccurate and it's not even close we're not within margin of error we're not even close to margin of error it's bronze or white label so where the 80 plus gold certification came from in terms of the unit we don't know when you send the power supply out you're not sending one say every 500 units you send one and then that's it and it's it's possible some of you if you bought this got one similar to that golden sample if maybe the whole batch was golden it's also possible that that was the only one and now they're all like ours where it's completely out of line with what the marketing states so when i was talking with patrick when we got to the end of this process the question i asked him after he did all the testing looked at everything and we sort of talked through it was ignoring the marketing is this still something you would feel comfortable buying let's pretend it's a 70 850 watt 80 plus bronze power supply they've listed it maybe more realistically can we still make a recommendation to viewers uh that was my question to him and he said it's not a great power supply i said okay so what is it and after some thought he said he wouldn't even call it a good power supply and i agree it would therefore end up with the glorious gn it's sort of fine asterisk where the asterisks is this is a power component and therefore we do not feel comfortable telling you that it's fine because who knows on one sample we don't really know uh if there's any sort of catastrophic failure in the future if it were a cpu cooler and it scored it's fine in our rankings it's easier to say well it's fine you can go ahead and buy it if you want but here we can't really we don't feel comfortable saying that we would recommend this for really any particular audience sometimes we can say well if you're really on a budget it's fine we can recommend it but we're not saying that here can't make that commitment if you actually need 850 watts and most people don't so double check that uh then it's probably better to spend a little bit more and get better quality if you just need the power supply to power a basic pc or a low end gaming pc maybe this works it probably is actually fine there we wouldn't pair it with high power consuming or expensive components this is definitely not a good overclocking choice though not something we can recommend we don't completely hate it uh the marketing is not correct though it's not a plus cold that's none of the story so thanks for watching as always you can leave comments below to request a another power supply for this series we're excited to be doing more of these we have a lot to learn so we're going to be working on improving our methodology adding more tests uh improving sort of charting data presentation we're still playing around with all that stuff ton to learn here but we think we have a pretty good foundation and we've got excellent resources in the industry we can talk with and try to learn from and certainly we're going to be learning uh as we test more of these so thank you for the support and this type of content it's a lot of fun for us we look forward to doing more and as always you can go to store.camerasaccess.net helps out directly by grabbing a modmat mouse mat or other item or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we actually have several behind the scenes videos talking about the power supply equipment and testing that patrick has hosted so check those out on patreon if you want to support us directly thanks for watching we'll see you all next timegenerally speaking there are two great ways to sell a product one of them is to make a good product and the other one is to just make things up and tell everyone that you did the first this is was the aries game ags 850. it's one of the top selling power supplies on amazon right now it's an 850 watt model it is cheap at 70 on sale right now up to 90 typically and that made us a little bit skeptical of it there's this very common and sort of lazy perception that just buying an 80 plus gold power supply is generally a safe bet or that this is the main way you determine the quality of a power supply but if gigabyte hadn't already taught us this this power supply might help further prove that that platitude isn't always the correct uh path to take so we're gonna be looking at the aries game 850. before that this video is brought to you by squarespace we use squarespace for our own gn store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so at the time of writing this power supply was 70 it's again typically about 90 at the max and the next closest competitor at the time of writing was 114 80 plus gold power supplies of 850 watts are typically closer to an average of 150 between amazon and newegg for us sellers and our objective with this review was genuinely getting into it after we sorted top power supplies on amazon was to figure out if it actually is that insanely good of a deal or if something else is going on with it this is actually the sixth best reviewed 850 watt power supply on amazon in totality and it's the 14th best reviewed power supply overall regardless of the wattage so that's a pretty high up ranking so we've got a weird one with this one because this power supply claims 80 plus gold it plasters it everywhere it's got it on the sticker on the power supply on at least three sides actually has it on the box these are stickers that will remain on them until all existing inventory moves through uh it claims 80 plus gold on retail websites like amazon it says it on the official aries game website and it says it in the manuals and other documentation so this power supply leans very heavily on being a cheap 80 plus gold power supply that's clearly the selling point and ultimately uh it's not 80 plus gold we were unable to verify the 80 plus gold claims in fact the manufacturer verified our verification that we couldn't verify the claims and so this is a problem because it's not anywhere close to 80 plus gold and people are buying it because of that because it's one of the easiest things to do for a system builder who doesn't really have the means to understand a power supply we don't blame you uh to just pick 80 plus gold as a safety net as a this is probably fine right that's a fairly high rating but as a reminder 80 plus it's just an efficiency rating it doesn't mean it's safe to use it doesn't mean it's good it doesn't test the protection mechanisms like scp ocp ovp or whatever the part where the review gets weird though is that we had to shoot it twice we shot the whole review and uh then in the process of editing it and working on it eventually we did get a response from aries game as normal way of course we normally reach out to a manufacturer when our findings greatly dispute to theirs to try and understand why that might happen sometimes the answer is very simple it's very very commonly the answer is they were lying but other times there might be a misunderstanding or we've discovered something that they were unaware of and these are important things to try and clarify before we publish obviously because we have responsibility to both parties although our primary concern is for consumers either way they did eventually reply and we've accidentally affected some change not all of what we want to see with this product but some of it ahead of the review launching where are's game has now started pulling down so the 80 plus gold claims and instead replaced it with just a simple 80 plus certification we'll come back to this efficiency chart in a little bit in more detail but our findings were very simple in nature although the power supply passed our protection testing meaning it didn't explode so it did better than gigabyte oh it also did not meet the claims of b and 80 plus gold and you can see that in this plot the ags 850 was actually below 80 plus bronze in our testing borderline 80 plus white label meaning below bronze and other aspects left much to be desired as well but for what it's worth we didn't encounter any catastrophic failures sadly that's more of a mark of quality today than it should be it is however short of the marketing claims in trying to give aries game a fair chance to respond to our findings and explain itself we received this answer from them quote our team lab tested again the samples left in the factory we found some samples reached gold and some samples did not reach gold and you were right about the ones that did not reach gold that was weirdly easy and non-confrontational doesn't normally work like that and we weren't really sure what to do with ourselves after that it actually took several days to completely rework the script and fig that's not we don't go into a potential conflict like that expecting resolution or expecting a reply at all and to be clear there's not resolution yet they haven't done what they really need to do and we'll get to that in the conclusion of this review to talk about what really needs to be done but uh if we give aries game the benefit of the doubt it seems like maybe they're open to doing the right thing even if it's because they saw our gigabyte testing and became afraid of it but uh it was just it threw us off plainly is uh is all we can really say about it normally we get a reply like no you although this was a move in the right direction and we'll go through all the testing too is the important part though the the product was still entirely marketed on a premise which as far as we can tell and they've now somewhat verified was a false premise it's marketed on something that is objectively untrue uh these are numbers they're very easy to prove or disprove because that's what they are it's sort of what you do with numbers so at best it's misleading it's maybe disingenuous intentionally or not and it's definitely worth condemnation to mismarket a product on things that are not reflective of reality what we can't know for sure is whether this was skullduggery or whether it was aries game making a genuine mistake aries game and defending itself said while the components have changed kovit has made it hard to get certain components and so we've changed the parts that are used to assemble the psu and that's why the rating is different if they're going through that many changes that the rating might change 480 plus they should resubmit the power supply sample and probably make a new sku so we're not forgiving them for what's happened here because there are ways to deal with it and they involve submitting another sample getting testing and finding out that you can't call it 80 plus gold anymore but that's an undesirable result so probably they tried to avoid it we don't have enough of a history with aries game thus far to judge if it wants to do the right thing or if it's afraid of a gigabyte scenario but either way aresgame asked us what it was we were after and we said that the marketing should be in line with reality we explained that especially with a western audience being truthful about a decent 80 plus bronze power supply won't hurt them but potentially lying or being perceived as line about an 80 plus gold one which isn't will hurt them ares game told us that it had updated the amazon page it thanked us for some of the information on western markets and that was more or less the end of the conversation as it stands now updating the amazon page to get rid of the 80 plus gold claims is the right direction but there's a few problems with this one of them these the listing remains and so this should really be a different sku because what they're doing is co-opting their own listing with what is functionally a new product benefiting from all the page rank the search rank on amazon it's very hard to accumulate uh and running underneath that product the whole list of pre-existing user reviews for something which this is at this point no longer so that's part of the problem with doing it that way another problem is that users who have already purchased this potentially have one like ours we bought this retail so you might have something if you bought it that is not as advertised that's a problem additionally any existing reviews references and build guides videos whatever will be linking back to a page which was once marketed as one thing gold and is now listed as another thing 80 plus blank so it's not a fix it's a band-aid what ares game needs to do is create a new listing but anyway let's get into the real testing and start talking about some of the numbers now that we've gotten through the bulk of the efficiency stuff that's really where the potential scandal was how they deal with it in the next week or so is really what's going to dictate what happens to this product but we can at least talk about if it's worth it if we ignore the 80 plus factor the rest of the power supply's marketing is pretty convincing it makes bold claims like stable supply less spend get one win all and gamer's partner gaming's mate and although it's fun and easy to make fun of marketing like this the power supply also has some maybe more impressive claims it claims it offers a 10-year warranty with fairly standard coverage for the most part which remains competitive at the price if you can trust aries game to stick around that long we're not saying that as an undeserved dig at aries game it's just a statement of reality it was started last year it's a sub brand of a major oem that claims it has been around for 15 years now the company also makes a lofty claims about its performance aries game says it can achieve the highest possible overclock it also plainly claims 90 efficiency at 115 volt ac which is a number we can actually put to the test this power supply does actually have an 80 plus report so it's not like they just took the sticker and put it on there which you could also do uh from what we can tell it appears as if there's an actual clear result result for the power supply being 80 plus gold now as for how that happens if it is in fact not 80 plus gold there's really two main ways one would be a company submitting potentially a fraudulent sample which was designed to pass certain bars with no intent of selling it that way we're not saying that's what happened here but that is one of the two main ways this could happen the other way is maybe they had a golden sample wherein the power supply happened to test extremely good it came from a particularly good batch that would never be created again or is created rarely and that could also get a high rating that is then applied to every power supply even the ones that don't do as well because maybe they use lower tier components for key issues we'll be talking about obviously there's the efficiency angle we'll also be going over the noisy output signals the load regulation sort of inadequacies that we discovered where it was just not great voltage ripple is pretty high we observed significant voltage variance from the lowest end of the tested loads to the heaviest loads that we tested and additionally we're a bit suspicious about the claims of the bearing that's in this fan as well it goes that low level now it's possible you could get this unit for 50 to 70 percent of the price of a competitor's actually 80 plus gold actually has the bearing it claims power supply at 850 watts you might decide the benefit there outweighs the shortcomings in terms of the cost benefit from this versus not technically being what it's claiming we didn't have a catastrophic failure so as we've tested it we haven't seen anything that causes us a safety concern other than maybe being just generally concerned about what else might be wrong with it but if you're willing to trade off the fact that it's not truly 80 plus gold for the fact that it's cheap well it's still something for you to consider buying but that's entirely on you at that point uh you have agency here you should be the one making that decision if which of those things you value higher than the other the money or buying the product that is represented the way it actually exists speaking strictly for ourselves uh patrick stone and i have the same view on it which is that with the power delivery component once there's a significant call to question of the integrity of the claims there's just there's enough other options there where we feel a little bit uncomfortable using it in one of our computers but again we haven't actually discovered a catastrophic failure it's more of just a general concern and you can ignore that if you'd like it's up to you time to get into some of the numbers for this we're still adding to our power supply testing it's relatively new to our test suite overall so there's still stuff we'd like to add later but we have a pretty well rounded suite at this point so let's get started for a bit of component analysis on this psu we're just going to kind of open it up sort of tear down style it's already been disassembled again please always be cautious when working with psus we don't recommend anyone open or work on them unless you absolutely know what you're doing this particular one has been discharged and we know that there's no charge left in this thing at all the modular connectors have no filtering around them which uh usually on power supplies you're going to see a few filtering caps around here but in this case they chose to put the filtering caps all on the main pcb if we look at where the power comes in the emi transient filter is pretty normal nothing too crazy going on here there is one thing that is missing on this section generally in addition to having a fuse here for voltage protection there's what's called an mov or a metal oxide varistor and there is not one on this psu which means that if you happen to get voltage surges then your psu could could go out and possibly parts inside your computer could be affected as well so if you are using this unit we do recommend that you get a surge protector or a ups unit which that's just good practice anyway as we go past the filter we hit the rectifiers here these turn the ac to dc for us and then from the rectifiers we go to the active power factor correction area over here in the active power factor correction area we have a couple of caps here and these caps are by cap exxon get a little shot of that right there these guys are 270 microfarad 420 volt and there's a pair of them here so we get microfarad total um not not exactly super strong for bolt caps could have probably done a little bit more but what we're going to see as we go through this thing is that they've they've kind of bargain selected some of the components as we move from the apfc we then go back to the other side of this thing and just inside between the transformer and on the inside of this heatsink you can see there is a what looks like a diode or in this case it's a transistor and there's a pair of them there these guys are set up in what's called a double forward converter configuration usually what we're used to seeing is an llc converter for this part of the power supply and this double forward is known to be less efficient and again we're going to see that when we look at the numbers on efficiency in just a minute as we go across from there we get the main transformer the transformer then uh dumps us over to the rectification for the outputs and uh we have the 12 volt rectification and then over here on this little board we've got 3.3 volt and 5 volt rectification and then we have output filtering caps all around the area here the output filtering caps are from a company named jsh for these conductive polymers and we couldn't find any information on those at all um and then we found some asia x capacitors here and here uh there are four of the taller ones and two of the smaller ones the asia x caps like other components aren't the best for for uh selection and then if we look at the 3.3 volt and the 5 volt we run into a brand named x-con and then i don't know if we can even get down this there's a another one in addition to this solid polymer cap there are there are four like this one on the bottom and the x-cons are up here and the four on the bottom again are jsh on the output filtering the capacitor selection leaves something to be desired and that that i think you're going to see that is going to come to bear and all the testing that none of the numbers look great there is an ntc thermistor and usually this guy has an associated relay with it and there is no relay on this particular power supply and that relay helps to boost efficiency after the power supply has already started up so just one more thing that's kind of missing on this psu back to my side to talk about efficiency for a bit so the ags 850 again it's advertised 80 plus gold it's possible that the unit sent to clear result the custodian for the 80 plus standard tested to that standard they do have it listed it is an issued certificate everything looks about as legit as it can look from clear result side so it's possible that it worked but based on the quality of the internal components and the performance of the unit in our testing it's unlikely that the units in circulation will perform to that level we bought this retail our sample certainly didn't anyway at 10 load the unit tested at clear results reported 86.23 while our sample from amazon came in at about five percentage points lower at 81.8 percent for efficiency at 10 percent at 20 load the officially submitted unit registered 89.98 efficiency in our comparable tests the power supply only delivered 85.8 efficiency these numbers might not sound like big differences but they are literally the tiers of 80 plus efficiency ratings that's the entire point of them and not much separates one from the next at least numerically the next marker for 80 plus is 50 load the clear result test noted an efficiency of 91.26 and the gn unit only hit in our testing 87.4 percent big difference the final checkpoint for 80 plus is 100 load and here the sample submitted by aries game registered 89.01 efficiency our lab tests we saw considerably lower results at 81.8 percent efficiency comparing the two graphs it's easy to see that there's a discrepancy if our testing results here are representative of the whole then the end result is that this power supply as it stands here only qualifies for 80 plus white label meaning not even bronze if we account for margin of error and for differences in devices chroma versus the sun moon for example uh perhaps if we're being generous we'll say that it's basically 80 plus bronze in fact that's we'll we'll just go ahead and say it's pretty close to 80 plus bronze and perhaps with the exact same testing rig we could draw that line but it's certainly not 80 plus gold even with device differences now on this content we worked with a couple of power supply engineers in the industry to cross-validate uh as you do when you're trying to do good science and they found similar results to ours they found also about 80 plus bronze plus or minus a little bit into the white label territory and ultimately it's pretty simple the only way to get prices lower like this unit is to sacrifice quality and that's what's happened here as for load regulation as noted earlier we don't have anything on transient response yet but we do have some stability information to share the voltage regulation at different loads saw amounts of variance beyond our desired specifications preferably we'd like to see less than two percent variation on all rails except for the 12 volt rail for 12 volts we consider less than one percent to be ideal on 12 volts we had 1.8 percent difference between our highest and lowest loads not quite up to our standards for 5 volts our test yielded a 2.6 difference coming in very close to our standard at 3.3 volts we tallied a 4.2 percent difference and on the 5 volt standby rail our tests registered 3.2 percent difference if we're aiming for a 2 variation on these rails then those numbers don't make the cut the other piece of stability information we have is the data on voltage riffle here we take a look at not only the ripple that remains from ac to dc conversion but also the noise surrounding the ripple almost any power supply is going to meet the intel multi-rail desktop power supply design guide specifications which ask for a maximum of 120 millivolts peak to peak on 12 volts and 50 millivolts peak to peak on 5 volts 5 vsb and 3.3 volts this guide is kind of ridiculous it's very out of date those numbers are maybe suitable for a super cheap oem build that doesn't use enthusiast class parts but the tolerances should be tightened for what most people on our channel are likely going to use our standards are considerably higher we want to see a 30 millivolt peak to peak and 25 millivolt peak to peak being our respective goals for those voltages we have leeway up to 80 millivolts for worse or bad power supplies that might not be powering heavy overclocks but ares game does explicitly mention in its manual and advertising that overclocking to the peak is part of its goal that means it needs to be closer to the stricter side like most power supplies voltage ripple on this unit got worse as we increase the load at 100 load the 12 volt rail stayed within intel spec at 98 millivolts but was woefully outside of our expectations all three of the other rails at 5 volts 3.3 volts and 5 vsb missed intel standard mark registering 58 52 and 74 millivolts respectively these numbers were also outside of our desired measurements as you'd expect because they're more strict this appears to be a simple case of component quality voltage ripple can be reduced with better components and tighter design requirements neither of which we're seeing in the review of this power supply moving over to the cooling fan it's a 140 mm cooling fan when we open this thing up to check the claims on the box the box said this is a hydraulic bearing fan so we decided we would go ahead and take out this little piece right here that which is basically a rubber stopper and then some uh clips that hold it in place and just sort of pull this apart just to check out if we could see anything look like hydraulic bearings and what we found instead was what basically looks like a sleeve bearing um so one more thing about the power supply where it says one thing and isn't exactly that on the protection testing we haven't quite gotten the whole suite mentioned in the atx multi-rail desktop power supply design guide covered but we're making progress for this unit we added scp or short circuit protection testing and we hope to be able to add otp testing next with ovp and uvp following afterwards let's see what patrick found for scp we took advantage of some built-in functionality on the sm8800 we were able to verify that every connector on the ags 850 responded correctly to short circuit protection by simply clicking these blue buttons here each one of them tests a different connector and when you hear that click that creates a short and the power supply should shut down in testing ocp we saw trip points that range from 112 on the plus 12 volt rail to 149 percent on the plus 5 volt rail the plus 3.3 volt rail had a similar trip point to the plus 5 volt rail at 146 percent while the plus 5 vsb rail tripped at 126 we'd like to see the trip points for the plus 5 and plus 3.3 volt lowered to be more in line with the plus 12 volt if area's game makes a second addition of this unit permitting the opp limit to reach 150 percent is too high we're hopeful that the units in circulation are more like the one we tested our unit trip wpp at 938.5 watts or about one hundred and ten point four percent that's a desirable obp value that's thankfully nowhere near under fifty percent a couple small positive notes to re-emphasize here so aries game did have good youtube documentation and a good starter guide that's actually a great effort to see some materials to help new builders more likely their audience anyway so we did like seeing some of the guides and we didn't have any problem with the ones that we saw we also liked that the protection seemed to work without exploding preemptively that's always a good sign so they are doing well there no catastrophic failures ripple and regulation were sub-optimal for oc but technically everything is kind of okay as long as it's marketed properly if this is marketed as 80 plus white label or bronze it pretty much resolves the issues we've had with it although they do need to make sure the fan bearing matches the marketing as well we ultimately need to see a new listing for this entirely on amazon because it's basically a new sku if they do launch a bronze or a white label one and we would want to see a resolution for customers who thought they bought 80 plus gold and ended up with something else although amazon will probably reinforce you there unfortunately amazon likely just throws a lot of this stuff straight in the trash once it gets a return if our tests again are indicative of the products in circulation then that's bad uh it's line at that point to call this 80 plus gold because that is factually inaccurate and it's not even close we're not within margin of error we're not even close to margin of error it's bronze or white label so where the 80 plus gold certification came from in terms of the unit we don't know when you send the power supply out you're not sending one say every 500 units you send one and then that's it and it's it's possible some of you if you bought this got one similar to that golden sample if maybe the whole batch was golden it's also possible that that was the only one and now they're all like ours where it's completely out of line with what the marketing states so when i was talking with patrick when we got to the end of this process the question i asked him after he did all the testing looked at everything and we sort of talked through it was ignoring the marketing is this still something you would feel comfortable buying let's pretend it's a 70 850 watt 80 plus bronze power supply they've listed it maybe more realistically can we still make a recommendation to viewers uh that was my question to him and he said it's not a great power supply i said okay so what is it and after some thought he said he wouldn't even call it a good power supply and i agree it would therefore end up with the glorious gn it's sort of fine asterisk where the asterisks is this is a power component and therefore we do not feel comfortable telling you that it's fine because who knows on one sample we don't really know uh if there's any sort of catastrophic failure in the future if it were a cpu cooler and it scored it's fine in our rankings it's easier to say well it's fine you can go ahead and buy it if you want but here we can't really we don't feel comfortable saying that we would recommend this for really any particular audience sometimes we can say well if you're really on a budget it's fine we can recommend it but we're not saying that here can't make that commitment if you actually need 850 watts and most people don't so double check that uh then it's probably better to spend a little bit more and get better quality if you just need the power supply to power a basic pc or a low end gaming pc maybe this works it probably is actually fine there we wouldn't pair it with high power consuming or expensive components this is definitely not a good overclocking choice though not something we can recommend we don't completely hate it uh the marketing is not correct though it's not a plus cold that's none of the story so thanks for watching as always you can leave comments below to request a another power supply for this series we're excited to be doing more of these we have a lot to learn so we're going to be working on improving our methodology adding more tests uh improving sort of charting data presentation we're still playing around with all that stuff ton to learn here but we think we have a pretty good foundation and we've got excellent resources in the industry we can talk with and try to learn from and certainly we're going to be learning uh as we test more of these so thank you for the support and this type of content it's a lot of fun for us we look forward to doing more and as always you can go to store.camerasaccess.net helps out directly by grabbing a modmat mouse mat or other item or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus we actually have several behind the scenes videos talking about the power supply equipment and testing that patrick has hosted so check those out on patreon if you want to support us directly thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"