Taking Risks on a Cheap PSU - $30 Thermaltake 430W SMART Power Supply Review

# Article: In-Depth Review of the Thermaltake 430W Smart Power Supply

## Introduction

In this detailed review, we will take an in-depth look at the Thermaltake 430W Smart power supply, a budget option designed for low-end and mid-range computers. This power supply is often recommended due to its affordability and 80 Plus certification, making it a popular choice among users seeking a cost-effective solution. However, we will examine whether this power supply lives up to expectations by testing its efficiency, voltage ripple, protections, and overall build quality.

## Components Overview

The Thermaltake 430W Smart power supply is part of the company's "Smart" series, which targets budget-conscious users. Below is a breakdown of its key components:

### Capacitors

- The power supply features standard electrolytic capacitors rather than high-quality solid polymer ones, which are typically found in more expensive units.

- A bulk capacitor from Tipo with a 105°C rating and 270 µF capacitance ensures basic filtering and stabilization of the output voltage.

### Rectifiers and Inductors

- The rectifier used is a GBU-806, rated for 8A, which handles the initial AC/DC conversion.

- Inductors are employed to filter out high-frequency noise, ensuring stable power delivery.

### Transformer

- A compact transformer is used to reduce size and weight, as higher frequencies allow for smaller components. This design choice prioritizes cost savings over efficiency or durability.

### Output Stages

- The power supply employs group regulation, which uses a single inductor to regulate both the 12V and 5V rails. While this reduces costs, it introduces cross-loading issues where heavily loaded rails can affect others.

## Voltage Ripple Testing

Voltage ripple is a critical factor in determining the stability of a power supply. The Thermaltake 430W Smart performed poorly in our tests:

- **12V Rail:** At full load (100% capacity), the voltage ripple measured an alarming 91.7mV peak-to-peak, exceeding the recommended maximum of 80mV.

- **5V Rail:** The ripple was 77.6mV at full load, which is also significantly higher than ideal.

- **3.3V Rail:** Slightly better with a ripple of 66.4mV, but still far from the desired range.

These results highlight that while this power supply may be adequate for basic systems, it struggles to maintain stable voltage levels under load.

## Efficiency and Power Factor Testing

The Thermaltake 430W Smart is certified for 80 Plus White efficiency, which means it achieves at least 80% efficiency at 20%, 50%, and 100% loads.

- **Peak Efficiency:** The power supply reached 84.2% efficiency at a 40% load, a common trend among budget units where peak efficiency is achieved before reaching full capacity.

- **Power Factor:** At full load, the power factor was just 0.989, slightly below expectations but acceptable for this price range.

## Protections and Reliability

The Thermaltake 430W Smart includes basic protections: Over Voltage Protection (OVP), Over Power Protection (OPP), and Short Circuit Protection (SCP).

- **Short Circuit Protection:** Tested on all rails, including the rarely used -12V rail. However, issues were noted with the lack of a bypass relay, affecting efficiency.

- **Over Current Protection (OCP):** The unit demonstrated limited effectiveness, with inconsistent shutdown thresholds across different rails.

- **Over Power Protection (OPP):** Functioned as expected, shutting down at approximately 131.9% load.

## Packaging and Cables

The power supply comes in minimal packaging, focusing on cost-effectiveness rather than elaborate presentation.

- **Cable Lengths:** The ATX cable measured 480mm, slightly shorter than advertised, while the CPU cable was 490mm. PCIe cables were also tested at 425mm and 150mm respectively.

- **Cable Quality:** All cables are rated for 300V, ensuring safety and durability.

## Conclusion

The Thermaltake 430W Smart power supply offers an affordable solution for budget builds, particularly for users with low-end systems such as home office setups or entry-level gaming PCs. However, its voltage ripple levels are unacceptably high, which can lead to instability issues for components operating under heavy loads.

While the power supply meets basic expectations and includes essential protections, its efficiency and voltage regulation leave room for improvement. For those on a tight budget and seeking reliable performance, we recommend considering alternatives with better voltage stability and slightly higher wattage ratings.

## Additional Information

For more in-depth reviews and technical content, you can support our work by visiting [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/gamerstech). We also offer premium products like anti-static mats and tools to help you build or maintain your systems with ease.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more detailed reviews and analyses in the future!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe bought this 30 power supply a top seller on amazon to see how it does when we throw it against our lab load tester back here this is only a 430 watt power supply but today that's enough to power most low end and mid-range computers it will not power a computer with one of these in fact 430 watts is not even enough only for this ignoring the rest of the computer but it shouldn't be rolled out just on the capacity alone and today we're going to take it apart to see how it looks internally and test for efficiency voltage ripple and everything else 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 our recent budget power supply roundup produced a lot of charts like these but these power supplies are all in the 50 to 80 dollar price range and what they were missing was a true dirt cheap power supply we we took it apart before this it didn't ship like that so today we're going to be reviewing this one now uh we wanted to go low end but we didn't want to go as low end as diablo tech or gigabytes gp750m so short of those diablo tech power supplies or the tiger direct ones this was the cheapest one that's actually 80 plus and actually still made and something that people are buying today so this is the thermaltake 430 watt smart that's its common name thermaltake labels its lowest end bottom of the barrel power supplies as its smart series which we assume is because in modern society intelligence is not valued so uh this is the one we were looking at we have taken it apart already we ran it through our load tester again back here for a series of tests to make sure it wouldn't explode and we've done a full look at the efficiency the voltage ripple everything else you need to know about it see if it's actually worth it because what we really want to look at here is not just the 50 to 80 range where you know they're probably pretty good power supplies we really wanted to see how far can you step down the power supply because you always hear people say in comments and videos including hours don't cheap out on a power supply but how cheap is cheaping out on the power supply is what we're going to try and answer today for the rating it's just an 80 plus white label which is the lowest of the 80 plus efficiency certificates that you can get so all kinds of problems with 80 plus certifications we've talked about those in the past and the shortcomings in a separate video that will link in the description below if you're curious but that's what it ships as and in terms of cabling it's just your standard 24 pin it'd be awfully inconvenient if they didn't include that and then two pcie cables that's it so you just get these two that are pigtailed together or daisy chained and uh no additional pcie connections and then one eight pin for the cpu along with your standard sort of sata and molex things like that floppy drive connector as well overall then this sets you up to run a pretty basic video card no more than two eight pins of course but you probably shouldn't really be close to that anyway so the fan you can see it's labeled thermaltake they call it the efs 12e 12m it's a 120mm fan which you can see measured against our modmat you can buy one of these on store.gamerzexus.net if you'd like to get one for pc disassembly and things like that and if we pull the label it is a very simple and cheap rifle bearing core in here which we've confirmed by destructively testing it it's packed with lubricant but otherwise there's nothing really of note uh than the the reservoir and the actual manufacturer for this fan is huaxing rong and they uh market it as a it's a 12 volt 0.25 amp fan not very powerful but it's i mean it's a 30 power supply so you're looking at probably a cost of about a dollar for this type of fan maybe a little bit more but it's basically the same thing you'd find in a cheap case we have the platform over here that patrick stone is going to walk you through in a bit to talk about the quality of the power supply and for the rest it's really just the case and not much else so when we're hooking this up for testing on our power supply load equipment our main goal was to verify that the protections actually work because the protections for your components very important and those are basically used for things like overpower protection over current protection short circuit protection things that matter a lot if you don't want your power supply to kill other parts in the system so that was our first goal because it's cheap and those are typically the things that either aren't present or don't work when they're cheap and they're also the things that turn a 30 purchase into a 500 purchase if it starts to kill other things in the system our next goal was to verify the 80 plus white certification here and make sure that it actually meets or exceeds the 80 plus basically below bronze specs that's not too hard to hit comparatively so that was goal number two and hopefully with that information we can help to paint a picture of whether it's actually worth 30 bucks just to get a computer up and running and one thing we noticed that you lose right away with a budget power supply is apparently accurate documentation from the manufacturer itself or at least from thermaltake the information on the website the online manual and the physical item like the box and the paper manual are all conflicting so we decided that the physical products superseded the online information and we mostly used that information for our testing input for this power supply works in most regions it states that it supports anything from 100 to 240 volts ac at anywhere from 47 to 63 hertz the physical labeling suggests that it can handle up to 10 amps on the input but in this particular case we would encourage viewers to look at the website for more accurate information because the gbu 806 ac dc rectifier inside this unit is only rated for 8 amps so the 10 amp number doesn't really make sense now before even plugging this in one of the things we immediately noticed that we didn't like was a very basic piece of information on the label you can see that 12 volts we can only get a maximum of 387 watts despite being a 430 watt power supply and we really don't like it when companies do this our viewpoint here when we're reviewing parts and people may have different opinions but our approach is that the 12 volt rails should be able to do the total capacity of the power supply because otherwise it's basically sort of cheating the spec or line because uh although it's declared people don't look at that 387 watt number they look at 430 almost all the power in your computer is 12 volts so the fact that it can do 110 watts combined on 3.3 and 5 but only 387 on 12 volts that doesn't make up for the difference we're seeing so that obviously annoys patrick stone and i when we're reviewing these things the 5 volt standby rail can do 12.5 watts and then the negative 12 volts doesn't really matter you can do 3.6 so those are fairly standard for that but it is lacking the ability to actually go up to 430 on 12 which when you're calculating your combined cpu plus gpu power under a full system load you should be doing so against 387 not against 430. so that's an important point that people overlook for this we need to do more of a teardown and some in-depth detail on which parts are good and bad in here what might cause your problem in the future if you actually use this thing and for that we're going to go to patrick stone he's going to be doing some uh switched mode power supply basics because this is a cheap blow-on power supply it actually serves as a great candidate for teaching about some of the basics of how power supplies work and what you need to look for when buying one so even if you're not buying this you get some value so we're gonna go to him for the tear down and then we're gonna come back and go through the numbers and the benchmarks we're going to do something a little different today we're going to throw in a block diagram something you guys have requested in the comment section we're going to hopefully take you from the input side of the power supply all the way to the output side and teach you about the individual stages and hopefully be able to relate those stages to the individual components that carry out those stages in the tt smart 430 there are uh x-caps and y-caps on the back side of the power connector this is an x-cap inside this heat shrink wrap and these little blue guys are caps but then as we go on to the main pcb where it would plug in from here which is these two contact points right here we also have another x cap that's this little yellow block and to be honest this little yellow block is pretty much the same thing you're finding over here in this heat shrink wrap then there's also two more y caps this little blue guy this little blue gas so in total you've got four y caps two x caps and two common mode chokes the common mode jokes are this guy and this guy and those pretty much complete the trans the emi filter now the transient part of the filter keeping the power transients from destroying parts inside the power supply starts right here we've got a regular fuse in this case it's a 240 volt fuse and then an mov or a metal oxide of a wrister that guy's job is to limit voltage spikes and then as we go around the power supply into the apfc section there's another piece that helps handle inrush current that's this right here this is an ntc thermistor now the ntc thermistor usually is accompanied by a bypass relay but that's not the case on this power supply because it's a lower cost power supply the bypass relay is strictly there for efficiency improvements and so on a low cost power supply they're going to go ahead and get rid of that component the next two blocks in the diagram are involved with apfc the rectifier handles the initial ac dc conversion that's this little guy right here and the tt430 it's an 8 amp gbu-806 if you're looking for that stamp on the components usually down here at the bottom the this particular 806 just means that it can handle 8 amps and 600 volts there are often two of these that handle higher current and higher upper psus there's only need for one with this conservative 431 output on the thermaltake the second block of the diagram shows an inductor that's this guy right here and a capacitor this guy right here which we've removed for safety the two components work with the other apfc electronics to get the power factor as close to one as possible before it moves on to the high frequency switching this part of the circuit also boosts the voltage and provides some filtering go back to the bulk capacitor this particular one is from tipo it's an lg series capacitor it's a 105c rating and if you look at the data sheet it's also 2 000 hours at 105c uh it's 420 volt and 270 microfarad the two center microfarad is underwhelming it's not very impressive but again this is a budget power supply so that's kind of what you're going to get the 105c is good there are lower rated temperatures on capacitors like 85c is common and the 2000 hours at 105c is also on the low end of things you can get ten thousand and twelve thousand hour rated capacitors there as well basically what we're getting at here is that because it's a budget power supply you're getting a budget capacitor capacitors with more capacitance uh and longer lifetime in terms of hours are what you're gonna find in a more expensive power supply the next block is necessary to reduce the size of the main transformer transformers have a nifty emf equation that helps to explain the relationship between size and frequency over simplifying things we can say that the higher the frequency the smaller the transformer can be and what i'm talking about is this versus that so this thing weighs probably as much as this power supply with the cables included if not more and we don't want to have to pack these in power supplies so that emf equation again overly simplified version of it basically says that if we increase the input signal frequency then we can reduce the size of this transformer the next stage is more rectification the high frequency low voltage signal has to be converted from an ac square wave that's like the other little line like that kind of thing into as close to a dc signal as possible the rectification can be done in a bunch of different ways but in this low-cost tt power supply they opted to go with two mhc hxm sbrs yeah that that's the name of the company another set of inductors and capacitors make up the final block labeled filter on the block diagram before output to your pc parts through these cables like this this stage also handles the output voltage regulation and the smart 430 the type of regulation is called group regulation and it's easily identifiable by the fact there are only two inductors the larger coil regulates the 12 volt and 5 volt output while the smaller coil is for 3.3 volt the group regulation is one of the cheapest ways to do regulation but it's usually avoided due to the cross loading problem that it creates and we'll touch on 12 volt 5 volt cross load as we get to the testing data inside the smart 430 watt typo sc series caps are added to each output to help smooth or filter the signal for the 12 volt signal we've got these two caps right here uh for the 5 volt and the 3.3 volt we've actually got the same set of caps it's a pair here for the 5 volt and a pair here for the 3.3 volt and then the negative 12 is this cap right here and then the 5vsb uses this cap right here all these caps are standard electrolytics you won't find any solid polymer caps on this unit as they're usually more expensive the passive rectification right here uh in in the sbr is the group regulation that's these two and these two inductors and the complete lack of solid polymer caps are a set of first in any of our gamer's access power supplier views up until this point we've seen mostly synchronous rectification so different circuit board right here with mosfets and independent regulation so more inductors and a mix of caps meaning electrolytics and solid polymers while we've been reviewing more expensive power supplies the presence of these design choices hints at a lower cost psu the reduced price point comes at the cost of reduced output signal quality there's a transformer that's just for the five vsp right here a little choke which is just for the five vsp and a micro controller or just just call it a controller in this case it's an accelence em856 this protections i see is the thing that handles things like short circuit protection and overpower protection our goal today was to take a block diagram and relate it to the internal components if you can take a look at internal components in a power supply and tell the difference between the internal components in an inexpensive power supply versus the ones in an expensive power supply then you can probably determine if the value is there and that's ultimately ultimately what we're shooting for at gn and now back to you steve we'll start our tasks with voltage ripple we were hoping for big exciting changes in the new atx v 3.0 multi-rail desktop platform power supply design guide and the voltage ripple specs are still exactly the same the maximum spec of 120 millivolts peak to peak on the 12 volt rail or 50 millivolts peak to peak on 5 volt 5 volt standby and 3.3 volts are still very lags for what we think is actually good so we'll continue to build comparisons to other power supplies as that provides more useful information than just simply testing against a spec that isn't really that good to begin with being an extremely cheap but still 80 plus power supply we expected the thermaltake 430 watt power supply to perform worse than everything else and it did it definitely didn't let us down in the voltage ripple measurements if we were looking for poor performance it excelled in performing poorly when compared to the 50 to 80 power supplies that we tested at 100 load it had almost double the peak to peak voltage ripple on the 12 volt rail at 91.7 millivolts this is one of the worst performing power supplies we've seen in terms of ripple keep in mind that we recommend a maximum of 80 millivolts ripple and we suggest that 60 millivolts is desirable for higher end parts or especially as you get into overclocking and this affects the stability of the system overall it's possible that some component combinations could experience instability from this level of ripple from the throw will take 430 watts smart but for most realistic combinations it's okay we'll forego going through all of the details on the ripple comparisons as the thermaltake smart power supply at 430 watts was the worst every time but well at least share the data for just this device without all the others on the chart it didn't fare much better on other voltage rails so at 100 load the best result was on the 3.3 volt rail which had 66.4 millivolts peak-to-peak ripple five-volt standby came in at 71.2 and the 5 volt rail was 77.6 millivolts those numbers are so poor that they don't even make the official atx guidance cut off that lands there will take worse than all the others we've tested this past year and also even in some cases below the very loose spec up next is power efficiency the thermaltake smart 430 watt is listed as 80 plus base certified which means that it has 80 percent efficiency at 20 percent 50 and 100 loads our testing verified certification on those loads the power supply reached its peak efficiency at 40 load when it registered 84.2 percent efficiency and we're seeing a trend in the budget power supplies where 40 load seems to be the level for that peak efficiency it'll be interesting to see if that holds true for more powerful units later but compared to the other budget power supplies the less expensive thermaltake smart 430 watt has lower efficiency than all the other competitors the evga 700 bq currently 60 dollars and rated bronze outperforms the thermaltake 430 watt and every metric it has significantly better 2 performance although this doesn't really matter that much considering losses on 2 load are minimal since it's such a low load and then if we look elsewhere it has 83.6 percent and 88.6 percent efficiency results for the higher load we'll describe the thermal take power supply as scraping by in most of these for 12v regulation across loads the inexpensive smart 430 watt did very well tying the sea sonic focus gm 650 for the best results this is only one test though let's look at 5 volt standby 3.3 volts and 5 volts for regulation these all show at least three percent variation ideally we would like to see something less than or equal to two percent variation but to reality check things we're talking about a thirty dollar power supply here so it's fine for its intended use just don't exit that use during the component analysis and teardown we talked briefly about group regulation and how it could have an impact on cross-load testing results these next two charts show exactly what we were talking about when heavily loading the 3.3 and 5 volt rails and leaving the 12 volt rail with very little load we can see that the 12 volt and 5 volt rails have a higher than desired meaning greater than 2 percent voltage variation at the same time the 3.3 volt rail sees almost no impact this relates directly back to the group regulation design where the 12 volt and 5 volt rails share the same inductor and where the 3.3 volt rail has a smaller but independent inductor the results are similar when the load is skewed heavily toward the 12 volt rail once again we see an obvious impact on the 12 volt and 5 volt rails of variations but the 3.3 volt rail is unaffected comparative power factor results are similar to the efficiency ones the thermaltake unit sits at the bottom of the chart at two percent forty percent and one hundred percent loads even at a hundred percent load where most power supplies exceed zero point nine nine power factor the smart for thirty watt couldn't quite get there it only registered a zero point nine eight nine the power factor results aren't what we'd call noticeably bad at this price class but they are objectively the worst of the bunch for protections the product page and packaging only claim ovp opp and scp or over voltage protection over power protection and short circuit protection we still put it through our regular test suite to see what would happen and the results were scattered looking at short circuit protection this is one of the protections that was supposed to be in place and for the most part it was just not in a complete and actually well executed sense in the first test pass it was evident that the 12 volt 5 volt 3.3 volt and 5 vsb rails each had a short circuit protection the rarely used negative 12 volt registered as a failure so to make sure it wasn't a mistake we ran through a second pass and then we confirmed the failure then it occurred to us that this is an inexpensive power supply so maybe that just removed the minus 12 volt signal together to save on cost so we checked for the presence of a blue wire on the atx 24 pin connector and it was there the 24 pin wire if you look at our mod map for example is the minus 12 volts rail that didn't necessarily indicate that there was power running across it so we next had to make sure that it was present by checking on an oscilloscope after verifying that the signal was there we ran the short circuit test two more times minus 12 volts failed short circuit protection on four straight passes at this point we began to doubt our own test equipment so we manually shorted the minus 12 volts to ground hoping for a shutdown instead we burned a diode on the bottom of the pcb so of course this destructive test was done after all the other power supply testing was complete and we believe that it's safe to say this power supply does not have short-circuit protection on the again rarely ever used minus 12-volt rail ocp was not claimed on the packaging or advertising for the product but as we stated we test for over current protection anyway since the manual stated that over power protection would trigger somewhere between 100 and 170 percent for the power we guessed that the same would be true for ocp if it's present so we moved the high end of our testing range for the main rails from 150 to 170 percent of the maximum rated current the 3.3 volt rail shut down the power supply at anything over 18 amps the 5 volt rail took 26.2 amps or 46 percent higher than its max rated 18 amps before shut down five volt standby followed the trend we've been seeing of reaching almost 200 percent of the maximum current rating now the thermal take power supply hit 192 percent or 4.8 amps before shutting down the 12 volt rail triggered a shutdown at just over 53 amps but it's possible that this was due to opp as the value exceeds the overpower protection limits that you'll see in just a moment our conclusion here for ocpu is that it looks like there's some overcurrent protection and this tracks with the capabilities of the grenerge gr8329n protections i see that's in there it's possible that thermaltake chose not to list it in the specs because ocp implementation was somehow incomplete or because of that 12 volt trigger point being so high finally overpowered protection fell in the middle of the advertised 110 to 170 range at 131.9 percent as with the other protections tests we ran at four passes to verify the results and each time opp triggered shutdowns at about the same point last up is the packaging of the power supply the construction quality of the cables looking at the wire gauge things like that and just overall how it's put together by thermal tank so opening up the thermaltake box they don't give you much there's some bubble wrap that protects the power supply and shipping so fair enough there's a paper manual which again conflicts with the information in the online manuals there's a warranty card and then there's power supply cable that goes to the wall so just a standard power cable where this one is an 18 gauge option and a few zip ties four screws for your computer case and of course a giant twist tie that was around the cables and that's it for the box so packaging is really straightforward we actually like this especially on a cheaper product it doesn't make sense to waste any significant portion of the cost of the power supply as a product on the packaging when it's already 30 they need to spend it on the actual product at that point so we're okay with everything that's in the box and around it as for the cables those are primarily 300 volt 80 degrees celsius 18 gauge options with the exceptions being the one specifically for signaling so that'd be like power good as far as the cable lengths go this is another place where the documentation was inconsistent with reality all of our measurements came up shorter than advertised the main atx cable is 480 millimeters meaning it's missing a full 20 millimeters off the target the cpu cable is 490 millimeters also a bit short it's the closest one though to the advertised measurement the pcie cables were both 425 millimeters to the first connector and a common 150 millimeters to the second all three of the storage and accessory cables were 450 160 and 160 millimeters to the first second and third connectors so thermaltake advertised longer lengths than reality which is just frustrating for a user who might be choosing their case based on or their power supply even based on their case where that eps 12 volt cable length has to be pretty precise wrapping up then thermaltake's 430 watt smart power supply is cheap at 30 and it's cheaper than you might spend on a family dinner or something like that and with its five year warranty it probably has hopefully more staying power than that same dinner would have now as for the statistics the actual numbers we put it through looking at our charts the thermaltake smart 430 watt is the worst that we've tested any time in the past year however there are far worse power supplies out there so it's not bad in the sense that we didn't have it catch on fire so that's a plus and it wouldn't be the first time we've had things catch on fire it was still within mostly acceptable range of performance for what it is it's not good so just be really clear on that voltage ripple for example is very high it's upwards of 90 millivolts depending on which metric you're looking at and it's the highest on our charts doubling some of the others that were 50 when we bought those power supplies so it's not a good performer but again we did not encounter anything that would be dangerous uh in our testing that doesn't preclude it from happening it could always happen but we didn't see it in our testing for short circuit protection the negative 12 volt was lacking it at least on our unit so that is something that should have been corrected for efficiency it was scraping by so then if budget is tight and you've specced out a very low end computer and hearing the phrase don't cheap out on a power supply doesn't help you because you just don't have the money to go more expensive with it the 30 430 watt thermaltake smart does seem like it's an okay option that would be acceptable for a really cheap computer if you are doing something like a home office build or a low end gaming pc maybe with something like a gt 1030 in it an a380 something like that this power supply is it maxes out about there i3 i5 r5 9k sku stuff like that and a low end gpu and the sub 200 class and it does seem okay for that if you need to save some money not everyone can just go buy a 50 power supply and that's what this market uh that's what this power supply fills in terms of the market demand so we didn't see anything majorly wrong to say don't buy this is what we're saying that's it for this one thanks for watching you can support this type of work directly by going to store.camerasnexus.net and grabbing one of our large modmats or medium modbads the large modmats are arriving very soon they have wiring diagrams if on the topic of power supplies you need to see how the pins are configured they're also an anti-static work surface for working on your computer protecting the table and the parts themselves and they now have a seven-year retroactive warranty that we've applied to everybody who's ever purchased one so if you want to support our efforts of continuing to expand that program head over to store.germantexas.net and grab one it also supports this testing or patreon.com gamersnexus where we're publishing some new behind the scenes posts for written content and some videos thank you for watching as always subscribe for more we'll see you all next timewe bought this 30 power supply a top seller on amazon to see how it does when we throw it against our lab load tester back here this is only a 430 watt power supply but today that's enough to power most low end and mid-range computers it will not power a computer with one of these in fact 430 watts is not even enough only for this ignoring the rest of the computer but it shouldn't be rolled out just on the capacity alone and today we're going to take it apart to see how it looks internally and test for efficiency voltage ripple and everything else 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 our recent budget power supply roundup produced a lot of charts like these but these power supplies are all in the 50 to 80 dollar price range and what they were missing was a true dirt cheap power supply we we took it apart before this it didn't ship like that so today we're going to be reviewing this one now uh we wanted to go low end but we didn't want to go as low end as diablo tech or gigabytes gp750m so short of those diablo tech power supplies or the tiger direct ones this was the cheapest one that's actually 80 plus and actually still made and something that people are buying today so this is the thermaltake 430 watt smart that's its common name thermaltake labels its lowest end bottom of the barrel power supplies as its smart series which we assume is because in modern society intelligence is not valued so uh this is the one we were looking at we have taken it apart already we ran it through our load tester again back here for a series of tests to make sure it wouldn't explode and we've done a full look at the efficiency the voltage ripple everything else you need to know about it see if it's actually worth it because what we really want to look at here is not just the 50 to 80 range where you know they're probably pretty good power supplies we really wanted to see how far can you step down the power supply because you always hear people say in comments and videos including hours don't cheap out on a power supply but how cheap is cheaping out on the power supply is what we're going to try and answer today for the rating it's just an 80 plus white label which is the lowest of the 80 plus efficiency certificates that you can get so all kinds of problems with 80 plus certifications we've talked about those in the past and the shortcomings in a separate video that will link in the description below if you're curious but that's what it ships as and in terms of cabling it's just your standard 24 pin it'd be awfully inconvenient if they didn't include that and then two pcie cables that's it so you just get these two that are pigtailed together or daisy chained and uh no additional pcie connections and then one eight pin for the cpu along with your standard sort of sata and molex things like that floppy drive connector as well overall then this sets you up to run a pretty basic video card no more than two eight pins of course but you probably shouldn't really be close to that anyway so the fan you can see it's labeled thermaltake they call it the efs 12e 12m it's a 120mm fan which you can see measured against our modmat you can buy one of these on store.gamerzexus.net if you'd like to get one for pc disassembly and things like that and if we pull the label it is a very simple and cheap rifle bearing core in here which we've confirmed by destructively testing it it's packed with lubricant but otherwise there's nothing really of note uh than the the reservoir and the actual manufacturer for this fan is huaxing rong and they uh market it as a it's a 12 volt 0.25 amp fan not very powerful but it's i mean it's a 30 power supply so you're looking at probably a cost of about a dollar for this type of fan maybe a little bit more but it's basically the same thing you'd find in a cheap case we have the platform over here that patrick stone is going to walk you through in a bit to talk about the quality of the power supply and for the rest it's really just the case and not much else so when we're hooking this up for testing on our power supply load equipment our main goal was to verify that the protections actually work because the protections for your components very important and those are basically used for things like overpower protection over current protection short circuit protection things that matter a lot if you don't want your power supply to kill other parts in the system so that was our first goal because it's cheap and those are typically the things that either aren't present or don't work when they're cheap and they're also the things that turn a 30 purchase into a 500 purchase if it starts to kill other things in the system our next goal was to verify the 80 plus white certification here and make sure that it actually meets or exceeds the 80 plus basically below bronze specs that's not too hard to hit comparatively so that was goal number two and hopefully with that information we can help to paint a picture of whether it's actually worth 30 bucks just to get a computer up and running and one thing we noticed that you lose right away with a budget power supply is apparently accurate documentation from the manufacturer itself or at least from thermaltake the information on the website the online manual and the physical item like the box and the paper manual are all conflicting so we decided that the physical products superseded the online information and we mostly used that information for our testing input for this power supply works in most regions it states that it supports anything from 100 to 240 volts ac at anywhere from 47 to 63 hertz the physical labeling suggests that it can handle up to 10 amps on the input but in this particular case we would encourage viewers to look at the website for more accurate information because the gbu 806 ac dc rectifier inside this unit is only rated for 8 amps so the 10 amp number doesn't really make sense now before even plugging this in one of the things we immediately noticed that we didn't like was a very basic piece of information on the label you can see that 12 volts we can only get a maximum of 387 watts despite being a 430 watt power supply and we really don't like it when companies do this our viewpoint here when we're reviewing parts and people may have different opinions but our approach is that the 12 volt rails should be able to do the total capacity of the power supply because otherwise it's basically sort of cheating the spec or line because uh although it's declared people don't look at that 387 watt number they look at 430 almost all the power in your computer is 12 volts so the fact that it can do 110 watts combined on 3.3 and 5 but only 387 on 12 volts that doesn't make up for the difference we're seeing so that obviously annoys patrick stone and i when we're reviewing these things the 5 volt standby rail can do 12.5 watts and then the negative 12 volts doesn't really matter you can do 3.6 so those are fairly standard for that but it is lacking the ability to actually go up to 430 on 12 which when you're calculating your combined cpu plus gpu power under a full system load you should be doing so against 387 not against 430. so that's an important point that people overlook for this we need to do more of a teardown and some in-depth detail on which parts are good and bad in here what might cause your problem in the future if you actually use this thing and for that we're going to go to patrick stone he's going to be doing some uh switched mode power supply basics because this is a cheap blow-on power supply it actually serves as a great candidate for teaching about some of the basics of how power supplies work and what you need to look for when buying one so even if you're not buying this you get some value so we're gonna go to him for the tear down and then we're gonna come back and go through the numbers and the benchmarks we're going to do something a little different today we're going to throw in a block diagram something you guys have requested in the comment section we're going to hopefully take you from the input side of the power supply all the way to the output side and teach you about the individual stages and hopefully be able to relate those stages to the individual components that carry out those stages in the tt smart 430 there are uh x-caps and y-caps on the back side of the power connector this is an x-cap inside this heat shrink wrap and these little blue guys are caps but then as we go on to the main pcb where it would plug in from here which is these two contact points right here we also have another x cap that's this little yellow block and to be honest this little yellow block is pretty much the same thing you're finding over here in this heat shrink wrap then there's also two more y caps this little blue guy this little blue gas so in total you've got four y caps two x caps and two common mode chokes the common mode jokes are this guy and this guy and those pretty much complete the trans the emi filter now the transient part of the filter keeping the power transients from destroying parts inside the power supply starts right here we've got a regular fuse in this case it's a 240 volt fuse and then an mov or a metal oxide of a wrister that guy's job is to limit voltage spikes and then as we go around the power supply into the apfc section there's another piece that helps handle inrush current that's this right here this is an ntc thermistor now the ntc thermistor usually is accompanied by a bypass relay but that's not the case on this power supply because it's a lower cost power supply the bypass relay is strictly there for efficiency improvements and so on a low cost power supply they're going to go ahead and get rid of that component the next two blocks in the diagram are involved with apfc the rectifier handles the initial ac dc conversion that's this little guy right here and the tt430 it's an 8 amp gbu-806 if you're looking for that stamp on the components usually down here at the bottom the this particular 806 just means that it can handle 8 amps and 600 volts there are often two of these that handle higher current and higher upper psus there's only need for one with this conservative 431 output on the thermaltake the second block of the diagram shows an inductor that's this guy right here and a capacitor this guy right here which we've removed for safety the two components work with the other apfc electronics to get the power factor as close to one as possible before it moves on to the high frequency switching this part of the circuit also boosts the voltage and provides some filtering go back to the bulk capacitor this particular one is from tipo it's an lg series capacitor it's a 105c rating and if you look at the data sheet it's also 2 000 hours at 105c uh it's 420 volt and 270 microfarad the two center microfarad is underwhelming it's not very impressive but again this is a budget power supply so that's kind of what you're going to get the 105c is good there are lower rated temperatures on capacitors like 85c is common and the 2000 hours at 105c is also on the low end of things you can get ten thousand and twelve thousand hour rated capacitors there as well basically what we're getting at here is that because it's a budget power supply you're getting a budget capacitor capacitors with more capacitance uh and longer lifetime in terms of hours are what you're gonna find in a more expensive power supply the next block is necessary to reduce the size of the main transformer transformers have a nifty emf equation that helps to explain the relationship between size and frequency over simplifying things we can say that the higher the frequency the smaller the transformer can be and what i'm talking about is this versus that so this thing weighs probably as much as this power supply with the cables included if not more and we don't want to have to pack these in power supplies so that emf equation again overly simplified version of it basically says that if we increase the input signal frequency then we can reduce the size of this transformer the next stage is more rectification the high frequency low voltage signal has to be converted from an ac square wave that's like the other little line like that kind of thing into as close to a dc signal as possible the rectification can be done in a bunch of different ways but in this low-cost tt power supply they opted to go with two mhc hxm sbrs yeah that that's the name of the company another set of inductors and capacitors make up the final block labeled filter on the block diagram before output to your pc parts through these cables like this this stage also handles the output voltage regulation and the smart 430 the type of regulation is called group regulation and it's easily identifiable by the fact there are only two inductors the larger coil regulates the 12 volt and 5 volt output while the smaller coil is for 3.3 volt the group regulation is one of the cheapest ways to do regulation but it's usually avoided due to the cross loading problem that it creates and we'll touch on 12 volt 5 volt cross load as we get to the testing data inside the smart 430 watt typo sc series caps are added to each output to help smooth or filter the signal for the 12 volt signal we've got these two caps right here uh for the 5 volt and the 3.3 volt we've actually got the same set of caps it's a pair here for the 5 volt and a pair here for the 3.3 volt and then the negative 12 is this cap right here and then the 5vsb uses this cap right here all these caps are standard electrolytics you won't find any solid polymer caps on this unit as they're usually more expensive the passive rectification right here uh in in the sbr is the group regulation that's these two and these two inductors and the complete lack of solid polymer caps are a set of first in any of our gamer's access power supplier views up until this point we've seen mostly synchronous rectification so different circuit board right here with mosfets and independent regulation so more inductors and a mix of caps meaning electrolytics and solid polymers while we've been reviewing more expensive power supplies the presence of these design choices hints at a lower cost psu the reduced price point comes at the cost of reduced output signal quality there's a transformer that's just for the five vsp right here a little choke which is just for the five vsp and a micro controller or just just call it a controller in this case it's an accelence em856 this protections i see is the thing that handles things like short circuit protection and overpower protection our goal today was to take a block diagram and relate it to the internal components if you can take a look at internal components in a power supply and tell the difference between the internal components in an inexpensive power supply versus the ones in an expensive power supply then you can probably determine if the value is there and that's ultimately ultimately what we're shooting for at gn and now back to you steve we'll start our tasks with voltage ripple we were hoping for big exciting changes in the new atx v 3.0 multi-rail desktop platform power supply design guide and the voltage ripple specs are still exactly the same the maximum spec of 120 millivolts peak to peak on the 12 volt rail or 50 millivolts peak to peak on 5 volt 5 volt standby and 3.3 volts are still very lags for what we think is actually good so we'll continue to build comparisons to other power supplies as that provides more useful information than just simply testing against a spec that isn't really that good to begin with being an extremely cheap but still 80 plus power supply we expected the thermaltake 430 watt power supply to perform worse than everything else and it did it definitely didn't let us down in the voltage ripple measurements if we were looking for poor performance it excelled in performing poorly when compared to the 50 to 80 power supplies that we tested at 100 load it had almost double the peak to peak voltage ripple on the 12 volt rail at 91.7 millivolts this is one of the worst performing power supplies we've seen in terms of ripple keep in mind that we recommend a maximum of 80 millivolts ripple and we suggest that 60 millivolts is desirable for higher end parts or especially as you get into overclocking and this affects the stability of the system overall it's possible that some component combinations could experience instability from this level of ripple from the throw will take 430 watts smart but for most realistic combinations it's okay we'll forego going through all of the details on the ripple comparisons as the thermaltake smart power supply at 430 watts was the worst every time but well at least share the data for just this device without all the others on the chart it didn't fare much better on other voltage rails so at 100 load the best result was on the 3.3 volt rail which had 66.4 millivolts peak-to-peak ripple five-volt standby came in at 71.2 and the 5 volt rail was 77.6 millivolts those numbers are so poor that they don't even make the official atx guidance cut off that lands there will take worse than all the others we've tested this past year and also even in some cases below the very loose spec up next is power efficiency the thermaltake smart 430 watt is listed as 80 plus base certified which means that it has 80 percent efficiency at 20 percent 50 and 100 loads our testing verified certification on those loads the power supply reached its peak efficiency at 40 load when it registered 84.2 percent efficiency and we're seeing a trend in the budget power supplies where 40 load seems to be the level for that peak efficiency it'll be interesting to see if that holds true for more powerful units later but compared to the other budget power supplies the less expensive thermaltake smart 430 watt has lower efficiency than all the other competitors the evga 700 bq currently 60 dollars and rated bronze outperforms the thermaltake 430 watt and every metric it has significantly better 2 performance although this doesn't really matter that much considering losses on 2 load are minimal since it's such a low load and then if we look elsewhere it has 83.6 percent and 88.6 percent efficiency results for the higher load we'll describe the thermal take power supply as scraping by in most of these for 12v regulation across loads the inexpensive smart 430 watt did very well tying the sea sonic focus gm 650 for the best results this is only one test though let's look at 5 volt standby 3.3 volts and 5 volts for regulation these all show at least three percent variation ideally we would like to see something less than or equal to two percent variation but to reality check things we're talking about a thirty dollar power supply here so it's fine for its intended use just don't exit that use during the component analysis and teardown we talked briefly about group regulation and how it could have an impact on cross-load testing results these next two charts show exactly what we were talking about when heavily loading the 3.3 and 5 volt rails and leaving the 12 volt rail with very little load we can see that the 12 volt and 5 volt rails have a higher than desired meaning greater than 2 percent voltage variation at the same time the 3.3 volt rail sees almost no impact this relates directly back to the group regulation design where the 12 volt and 5 volt rails share the same inductor and where the 3.3 volt rail has a smaller but independent inductor the results are similar when the load is skewed heavily toward the 12 volt rail once again we see an obvious impact on the 12 volt and 5 volt rails of variations but the 3.3 volt rail is unaffected comparative power factor results are similar to the efficiency ones the thermaltake unit sits at the bottom of the chart at two percent forty percent and one hundred percent loads even at a hundred percent load where most power supplies exceed zero point nine nine power factor the smart for thirty watt couldn't quite get there it only registered a zero point nine eight nine the power factor results aren't what we'd call noticeably bad at this price class but they are objectively the worst of the bunch for protections the product page and packaging only claim ovp opp and scp or over voltage protection over power protection and short circuit protection we still put it through our regular test suite to see what would happen and the results were scattered looking at short circuit protection this is one of the protections that was supposed to be in place and for the most part it was just not in a complete and actually well executed sense in the first test pass it was evident that the 12 volt 5 volt 3.3 volt and 5 vsb rails each had a short circuit protection the rarely used negative 12 volt registered as a failure so to make sure it wasn't a mistake we ran through a second pass and then we confirmed the failure then it occurred to us that this is an inexpensive power supply so maybe that just removed the minus 12 volt signal together to save on cost so we checked for the presence of a blue wire on the atx 24 pin connector and it was there the 24 pin wire if you look at our mod map for example is the minus 12 volts rail that didn't necessarily indicate that there was power running across it so we next had to make sure that it was present by checking on an oscilloscope after verifying that the signal was there we ran the short circuit test two more times minus 12 volts failed short circuit protection on four straight passes at this point we began to doubt our own test equipment so we manually shorted the minus 12 volts to ground hoping for a shutdown instead we burned a diode on the bottom of the pcb so of course this destructive test was done after all the other power supply testing was complete and we believe that it's safe to say this power supply does not have short-circuit protection on the again rarely ever used minus 12-volt rail ocp was not claimed on the packaging or advertising for the product but as we stated we test for over current protection anyway since the manual stated that over power protection would trigger somewhere between 100 and 170 percent for the power we guessed that the same would be true for ocp if it's present so we moved the high end of our testing range for the main rails from 150 to 170 percent of the maximum rated current the 3.3 volt rail shut down the power supply at anything over 18 amps the 5 volt rail took 26.2 amps or 46 percent higher than its max rated 18 amps before shut down five volt standby followed the trend we've been seeing of reaching almost 200 percent of the maximum current rating now the thermal take power supply hit 192 percent or 4.8 amps before shutting down the 12 volt rail triggered a shutdown at just over 53 amps but it's possible that this was due to opp as the value exceeds the overpower protection limits that you'll see in just a moment our conclusion here for ocpu is that it looks like there's some overcurrent protection and this tracks with the capabilities of the grenerge gr8329n protections i see that's in there it's possible that thermaltake chose not to list it in the specs because ocp implementation was somehow incomplete or because of that 12 volt trigger point being so high finally overpowered protection fell in the middle of the advertised 110 to 170 range at 131.9 percent as with the other protections tests we ran at four passes to verify the results and each time opp triggered shutdowns at about the same point last up is the packaging of the power supply the construction quality of the cables looking at the wire gauge things like that and just overall how it's put together by thermal tank so opening up the thermaltake box they don't give you much there's some bubble wrap that protects the power supply and shipping so fair enough there's a paper manual which again conflicts with the information in the online manuals there's a warranty card and then there's power supply cable that goes to the wall so just a standard power cable where this one is an 18 gauge option and a few zip ties four screws for your computer case and of course a giant twist tie that was around the cables and that's it for the box so packaging is really straightforward we actually like this especially on a cheaper product it doesn't make sense to waste any significant portion of the cost of the power supply as a product on the packaging when it's already 30 they need to spend it on the actual product at that point so we're okay with everything that's in the box and around it as for the cables those are primarily 300 volt 80 degrees celsius 18 gauge options with the exceptions being the one specifically for signaling so that'd be like power good as far as the cable lengths go this is another place where the documentation was inconsistent with reality all of our measurements came up shorter than advertised the main atx cable is 480 millimeters meaning it's missing a full 20 millimeters off the target the cpu cable is 490 millimeters also a bit short it's the closest one though to the advertised measurement the pcie cables were both 425 millimeters to the first connector and a common 150 millimeters to the second all three of the storage and accessory cables were 450 160 and 160 millimeters to the first second and third connectors so thermaltake advertised longer lengths than reality which is just frustrating for a user who might be choosing their case based on or their power supply even based on their case where that eps 12 volt cable length has to be pretty precise wrapping up then thermaltake's 430 watt smart power supply is cheap at 30 and it's cheaper than you might spend on a family dinner or something like that and with its five year warranty it probably has hopefully more staying power than that same dinner would have now as for the statistics the actual numbers we put it through looking at our charts the thermaltake smart 430 watt is the worst that we've tested any time in the past year however there are far worse power supplies out there so it's not bad in the sense that we didn't have it catch on fire so that's a plus and it wouldn't be the first time we've had things catch on fire it was still within mostly acceptable range of performance for what it is it's not good so just be really clear on that voltage ripple for example is very high it's upwards of 90 millivolts depending on which metric you're looking at and it's the highest on our charts doubling some of the others that were 50 when we bought those power supplies so it's not a good performer but again we did not encounter anything that would be dangerous uh in our testing that doesn't preclude it from happening it could always happen but we didn't see it in our testing for short circuit protection the negative 12 volt was lacking it at least on our unit so that is something that should have been corrected for efficiency it was scraping by so then if budget is tight and you've specced out a very low end computer and hearing the phrase don't cheap out on a power supply doesn't help you because you just don't have the money to go more expensive with it the 30 430 watt thermaltake smart does seem like it's an okay option that would be acceptable for a really cheap computer if you are doing something like a home office build or a low end gaming pc maybe with something like a gt 1030 in it an a380 something like that this power supply is it maxes out about there i3 i5 r5 9k sku stuff like that and a low end gpu and the sub 200 class and it does seem okay for that if you need to save some money not everyone can just go buy a 50 power supply and that's what this market uh that's what this power supply fills in terms of the market demand so we didn't see anything majorly wrong to say don't buy this is what we're saying that's it for this one thanks for watching you can support this type of work directly by going to store.camerasnexus.net and grabbing one of our large modmats or medium modbads the large modmats are arriving very soon they have wiring diagrams if on the topic of power supplies you need to see how the pins are configured they're also an anti-static work surface for working on your computer protecting the table and the parts themselves and they now have a seven-year retroactive warranty that we've applied to everybody who's ever purchased one so if you want to support our efforts of continuing to expand that program head over to store.germantexas.net and grab one it also supports this testing or patreon.com gamersnexus where we're publishing some new behind the scenes posts for written content and some videos thank you for watching as always subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"