The Importance of Power Supply Testing and Monitoring in Gaming PCs

In order to ensure the reliability and longevity of gaming PCs, it is crucial to have a comprehensive testing and monitoring system in place. One such system involves creating an enclosure that houses various components essential for power supply testing, including timing noise analyzers, oscilloscopes, and single-phase power meters.

The Importance of Timing Noise Analyzers

A timing noise analyzer is a vital component in the testing process. It has multiple slots where users can insert various modules to monitor different signals, such as 12 volts, 5 volts, and 3.3 volts. This device allows users to set limits for each signal and monitor if they exceed those limits, indicating potential problems with the power supply.

The Use of Oscilloscopes

Oscilloscopes are another essential tool in power supply testing. They provide a visual representation of the signals being monitored, making it easier to identify any issues or anomalies. Users can insert various third-party oscilloscopes into the device, allowing for greater flexibility and customization.

The Need for Multiple Power Supplies

To ensure comprehensive testing, multiple power supplies are required. In this case, eight 400 W TSMC 400W loads and one dual 100W load were used. These loads can be connected in parallel, allowing users to set all of them to 12 volts. The reason for using so many power supplies is the concept of slew rate, which refers to the rate at which the loads can change their demand.

Simulating Real-World Power Supply Testing

The ultimate goal of this testing system is to simulate real-world power supply testing in a controlled environment. Users can hook up the power supply directly to an actual computer and test its performance under various scenarios. This approach allows for more accurate results, as it replicates the exact conditions that a real gaming PC would face.

The Role of Automated Testing

Automated testing is essential for optimizing the testing process. A script can be written to crank the load up to 150% and send it to the system, allowing for faster and more efficient testing. This approach enables users to test multiple scenarios quickly and accurately, making it an ideal tool for researchers and power supply manufacturers alike.

Efficiency Monitoring

Single-phase power meters are used to monitor the efficiency of the power supplies. These devices provide valuable insights into the power consumption of the system, allowing users to identify areas for improvement. By monitoring efficiency, users can ensure that their power supplies are operating at optimal levels, reducing energy waste and prolonging the lifespan of the components.

The Importance of Reliable Power Supplies

Reliable power supplies are essential for maintaining the health and performance of gaming PCs. A well-designed power supply system should be able to handle a wide range of power demands without compromising its reliability or efficiency. By using multiple power supplies, monitoring efficiency, and simulating real-world testing scenarios, users can ensure that their power supplies meet the demands of modern gaming PCs.

The Sponsor: Sonic

Sonic is the sponsor of this project, providing high-quality power supplies that have proven themselves to be reliable and efficient. Their products are designed with advanced features and technologies, making them ideal for use in gaming PCs. By partnering with Sonic, users can ensure that their power supply system meets the highest standards of performance and reliability.

Exclusive Content: Float Plane

For those who want to dive deeper into the world of power supply testing and monitoring, an exclusive content piece is available on floatplane.com. This article features an interview between Kyle and Jake, two experienced professionals in the field of power supply testing. The conversation is candid and informative, providing valuable insights into the latest trends and best practices in power supply design and testing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, comprehensive power supply testing and monitoring are essential for maintaining the health and performance of gaming PCs. By using a combination of timing noise analyzers, oscilloscopes, single-phase power meters, and automated testing scripts, users can ensure that their power supplies meet the demands of modern gaming PCs. With the right tools and expertise, users can optimize their power supply system and enjoy a more efficient, reliable, and high-performing gaming experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is my car this is my wife's car and this right here is the power supply tester I just bought from chroma system solutions that cost more than both of them combined why am I smiling because with this I'm going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff the good from the bad we're going to be able to take power supplies like this and blow them the freak up but of course in order to do that we're going to need to open it up aren't we which is going to involve some uh heavy tools oh I'm not supposed to do that you can see he's genuinely upset I've been 6 months researching this what are you doing man we're going to have some fun today and it's going to be sponsored by Future lus here didn't get the memo till we were done filming but apparently this video is sponsored by C Sonic imagine having the stones the Swagger to sponsor content about a piece of testing equipment that has the potential to to make your products look bad compared to the competition clearly they've got a lot of confidence in their products and you can check out seic power supplies at the link down below you swear on your mother's life that this is the good shiz right that's what C Sonic said they help me spec this and then I basically just got their spec just the newer stuff the newer stuff so we have better power supply testing equipment than a Tier 1 power supply manufacturer I'm assuming they've upgraded since we talked so maybe how strong are your wrists pretty good I didn't bring an impact driver and there's a lot of screws up there L LTT store.com you don't even have like a power anything no just use your guns man oh my God I love our screwdriver but these are a little long to do by hand there's like 25 of them it's all about right tool for the job right how's your arm man I almost beat you I got eight of them out already dude we couldn't find impact drive is it a drill let me load up an impact driver and then start working on these side ones oh that didn't work waa this is looking real scientific holy okay come here this is really cool now it's all fine and good to put stickers on your package fragile this side up we all know what couriers do they see that they go let's play point the arrow down right well this guarantees they never did it if this indicator is red make a notation of delivery receipt blah blah blah see watch boom perar red that means it stayed right side up the whole time it was in transit super cool right now that he's crumpled up the serial number in theory these have serial numbers on them so that you know they weren't switched in transit is this open now hold on hold on hold on wait okay no it's okay it's fine we got no we got to get the moment no I know I know it's one two 3 Let's Go come on well fudge here we go well that was a little anticlimactic check it out there's another one inside come on David check so this indicates not only did it stay right side up but it didn't tip because you can see the sand will like go to one side or whatever test instrumentation and automated test systems power conversion wow free us b key uh no no that's I think that's the software key sofware yeah I don't know if it if it's true in the new software we're getting but the old software that's the license key if you lose that it's 70 grand replace it 70 grand I'm pulling the number up my butt but it's it's expens don't lose that no no no no no no put put it back how much power can this whole thing draw or does it the whole thing draw so 208 3phase at 50 amps is what it's rated for what the that's what Watt that's what the ca's rated for this is rated for 10,000 Watts uh maybe um I haven't done the conversion in my head but we can only draw the maximum that the source will allow and that's 3,500 Watts 3,500 Watts that means that we'll be able to test basically any power supply on the market because anything over about 2,000 watts is going to trip a North American breaker and anything over about what is it like 2500 3,000 WTS that's going to trip a European breaker anyway we're on the limit of what Europe can do oh this is really cool you can see from the plug we've got a ground connection to this gigantic bare metal strip here and then unlike a normal server shelf these are bare metal as well and they're screwed in like this what that means is that every single shelf every piece of metal in this entire enclosure is grounded so in a production environment that's important because well if a if a live Le would is short to the chassis yeah and an operator was touching it you want to make sure the operator isn't the lowest path to ground right so we'll have all of these green wires everywhere right and even on the powder coated stuff it'll go straight through they'll powder coat afterwards and make sure the stud touches the actual metal that's also why the whole thing's enclosed locked safety labels the whole shebang okay there's shall we take off there's a monitor yeah there's a computer there's a computer on here comes with a little shelf and everything yeah look at that I asked for the Shelf oh okay how much did I pay for the Shelf $130,000 no no I mean just I have no idea you didn't even ask what the different options are worth or anything like to decide if we could have provided our own shelf maybe like how much should I pay for this Logitech mouse oh not even a rechargeable battery in there brother is there a computer did I pay for a computer yes it's industrial grade Dell computer oh my god oh look it comes with the key what is with all of these discs why do we have discs you even included a USB key are they just all the same thing or what like oh my God Kyle yes they don't expect us to build our own bloody cable harnesses here do they those are like 24 pin ATX pins and here's a 24 pin ATX connector do I have to like build my own DIY power supply here or what why are you telling me this like you're the one who's actually going to be building this stuff well do you understand how configurable this machine is trust me you want to build youring cables you see all of these ones yeah you see how it says load 2 3 4 5 6 7even yeah those are these guys okay so if these like overcurrent or something then would they blow their load no no you know what we'll go through it once we actually do a rundown of each of the modules um and I'll explain why those are important yeah check it out I made a whole thing oh they actually connect together that's Prett cool yeah that's not in but yeah that's what she said I think we should go bottom to top reason being because that's where power comes in so this is a 3,000 volt amp AC so we'll be able to test any PC power supply on the market and realistically just about any other power supply as well so this is also a three-phase power supply it can do both single and three-phase but we only have it hooked up for single phase right now because we're only targeting adx power supplies eventually we might do service stuff but that's in the future what's cool about this is it can do any anything with the power so it can do 240 volts 50 HZ for European Brothers it can do 11060 or 1260 for North America it can also start injecting like yeah can we simulate dirty power dirty power power like bad power so we can we can Brown out the power we can overvolt the power we can inject harmonics into the actual AC sine wave like if you had a blender or some crap running Elsewhere on the circuit like a very noisy like motor somewhere that like feeding very like dirty a blender yeah or microwave or something on the there's no motor in a microwave except it's been the turntable that's probably not the problem yeah probably the worst thing to compare it to but it it it can do that and it can do that all automatic thing what does this do all right so that's an onoff controller it turns stuff on and off um oh my god really that's all it does uh yeah what's this de short circuit protection and ovp tester so basically that will short out the power Supply the most fun test ever as well as it will overvolt the power supply so it takes this is one of our likely fire starters then right here maybe so what it does is it'll take voltage from the DC source and add it to the output from the power supply so if you're getting 12 volts out it will just like add a couple voltage to that and see if the power supply holy crap this is not supposed to be happening and and cut and cuts it yeah right you claim this is where things get interesting as we were talking about before this is the Anderson connection panel these all hook into these loads which we'll get to in a minute and that's basically the output of the AC source so that's where we plug power supplies into got it okay so after after adapting it from that to normal plug right so our AC source is as clean or dirty as we Speck it to be and this is effectively your wall outlet at home but you know with an adap well so the idea with this is to actually have a test enclosure that we put down here and plug into this or we even make a back plane that just slots in right cuz these are all very precisely put in place right so we could easily have like a PCB with Anderson connectors the PCB Mount ones not regular ones sure that we could just slide in and there's power these are all your signal stuff that goes up to um this guy and this guy yeah and these are all these and um these channels I believe are temperature sensing channels that is a byproduct of this guy Okay cool so this is basically the business end where we plug the victims in and the idea is that by having an enclosure here we can control the environment that the power supply is operating in so that we could run any number of different permutations clean power dirty power cold hot there's a more practical thing for an enclosure so when power supplies blow up we don't yeah that too this this yeah what's this point uh so it's a timing noise analyzer the module has a whole bunch of slots that you can stick into it what these do is Monitor all the signals right so if you have 12 volts 5 Vols and 3.3 this is monitoring it from a past fail event so we don't actually get data out of this so you set limits and this will see if it breaks those limits got it well where do we get data from then uh this guy okay oh and that's missing that's the oscilloscope I see they allow a variety of third party oscilloscopes we haven't decided on one yet but that's going to go there a four Channel oscilloscope and that will give you pretty graphs and like actual things that people can understand where this will give you the past fail data now here's something I need to understand a little bit better if our were l oh wait no I get it oh my God why do we need so many of them okay cool I spent the majority of time like gaming the system to get us this the idea of these is we have 400 WTS 400 wats 400 watts 400 wat 400 4 4 400 these are eight 400 WT loads and one dual 100 watt load so these Can it can do 200 Watts total but 100 on each channel the idea is this is for your 5 volts and your 3.3 most power supplies are under 100 Watts on those rails there are a few that are above only older stuff the newest stuff the 1600 watts can sometimes do 125 these loads can be connected in parallel right so you can set all of these guys to 12 vs the reason why I went with so many is something called slew rate so that's the rate at which these loads can change their demand right okay so each one of these loads can change the demand at 6 amps per microc so you take 6 amps you multiply by 12 you get uh 60 72 so 72 watts each one of these can change their load at 72 watts per micros with all eight of these loads we can change the the the rate of power draw at 760 watts per microc okay the idea was to electronically simulate 3090 kicking on but then Nvidia released 4090 and I was like I don't have enough space so the future goal is just to have a test bench right next to it where you can just literally hook the power supply instead of hooking into this hook it into an actual computer and simulate a real world example well think about that won't be as repeatable though no but think about it this way someone's complaining about a certain power supply blowing up under certain architecture you can build that architecture get the power supply put the power supply down and monitor the voltages as it's and then we could create a simulated load based on what we monitored and find out if anything will blow up you hide a guy to automate GPU testing just get him to get a script that cranks it to like 150% and just sends it as we get more experience using this I'm assuming we're going to come up with our own stuff cool and then what do these do so uh single phase power meter Yeah so basically efficiency so if we want if we want to test uh 80 whatever or maybe something more meaningful like 90 plus yeah sure okay so that that just monitors your power through and then this just looks like a basic ass multimeter yeah digital multimeter so it's got It's got a um if we have an oscilloscope do we need this there's a reason why we need it I've forgotten it um I'm going to blame I'm going to blame food again you know what I've forgotten our sponsor see Sonic man those guys never cease to amaze me great people great power supplies I mean clearly because if they didn't have the confidence to know this thing is going to make them look good rather than bad why would they have gotten involved in helping us Speck it this is like I said very similar to the unit they have although ours is a little bit newer unless they upgrade which means that if they're doing a great job of Designing their power supplies there shouldn't be any surprises so go check them out at the link down in the video description they've got long warranties great efficiency just they're quiet what what else can you ask for if you guys think Kyle and I are brutal with each other you wouldn't believe what doesn't make it into the videos we just uploaded an exclusive on float plane.com of me and Jake and it gets pretty spicy BMWs are bad cars Jake come at methis is my car this is my wife's car and this right here is the power supply tester I just bought from chroma system solutions that cost more than both of them combined why am I smiling because with this I'm going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff the good from the bad we're going to be able to take power supplies like this and blow them the freak up but of course in order to do that we're going to need to open it up aren't we which is going to involve some uh heavy tools oh I'm not supposed to do that you can see he's genuinely upset I've been 6 months researching this what are you doing man we're going to have some fun today and it's going to be sponsored by Future lus here didn't get the memo till we were done filming but apparently this video is sponsored by C Sonic imagine having the stones the Swagger to sponsor content about a piece of testing equipment that has the potential to to make your products look bad compared to the competition clearly they've got a lot of confidence in their products and you can check out seic power supplies at the link down below you swear on your mother's life that this is the good shiz right that's what C Sonic said they help me spec this and then I basically just got their spec just the newer stuff the newer stuff so we have better power supply testing equipment than a Tier 1 power supply manufacturer I'm assuming they've upgraded since we talked so maybe how strong are your wrists pretty good I didn't bring an impact driver and there's a lot of screws up there L LTT store.com you don't even have like a power anything no just use your guns man oh my God I love our screwdriver but these are a little long to do by hand there's like 25 of them it's all about right tool for the job right how's your arm man I almost beat you I got eight of them out already dude we couldn't find impact drive is it a drill let me load up an impact driver and then start working on these side ones oh that didn't work waa this is looking real scientific holy okay come here this is really cool now it's all fine and good to put stickers on your package fragile this side up we all know what couriers do they see that they go let's play point the arrow down right well this guarantees they never did it if this indicator is red make a notation of delivery receipt blah blah blah see watch boom perar red that means it stayed right side up the whole time it was in transit super cool right now that he's crumpled up the serial number in theory these have serial numbers on them so that you know they weren't switched in transit is this open now hold on hold on hold on wait okay no it's okay it's fine we got no we got to get the moment no I know I know it's one two 3 Let's Go come on well fudge here we go well that was a little anticlimactic check it out there's another one inside come on David check so this indicates not only did it stay right side up but it didn't tip because you can see the sand will like go to one side or whatever test instrumentation and automated test systems power conversion wow free us b key uh no no that's I think that's the software key sofware yeah I don't know if it if it's true in the new software we're getting but the old software that's the license key if you lose that it's 70 grand replace it 70 grand I'm pulling the number up my butt but it's it's expens don't lose that no no no no no no put put it back how much power can this whole thing draw or does it the whole thing draw so 208 3phase at 50 amps is what it's rated for what the that's what Watt that's what the ca's rated for this is rated for 10,000 Watts uh maybe um I haven't done the conversion in my head but we can only draw the maximum that the source will allow and that's 3,500 Watts 3,500 Watts that means that we'll be able to test basically any power supply on the market because anything over about 2,000 watts is going to trip a North American breaker and anything over about what is it like 2500 3,000 WTS that's going to trip a European breaker anyway we're on the limit of what Europe can do oh this is really cool you can see from the plug we've got a ground connection to this gigantic bare metal strip here and then unlike a normal server shelf these are bare metal as well and they're screwed in like this what that means is that every single shelf every piece of metal in this entire enclosure is grounded so in a production environment that's important because well if a if a live Le would is short to the chassis yeah and an operator was touching it you want to make sure the operator isn't the lowest path to ground right so we'll have all of these green wires everywhere right and even on the powder coated stuff it'll go straight through they'll powder coat afterwards and make sure the stud touches the actual metal that's also why the whole thing's enclosed locked safety labels the whole shebang okay there's shall we take off there's a monitor yeah there's a computer there's a computer on here comes with a little shelf and everything yeah look at that I asked for the Shelf oh okay how much did I pay for the Shelf $130,000 no no I mean just I have no idea you didn't even ask what the different options are worth or anything like to decide if we could have provided our own shelf maybe like how much should I pay for this Logitech mouse oh not even a rechargeable battery in there brother is there a computer did I pay for a computer yes it's industrial grade Dell computer oh my god oh look it comes with the key what is with all of these discs why do we have discs you even included a USB key are they just all the same thing or what like oh my God Kyle yes they don't expect us to build our own bloody cable harnesses here do they those are like 24 pin ATX pins and here's a 24 pin ATX connector do I have to like build my own DIY power supply here or what why are you telling me this like you're the one who's actually going to be building this stuff well do you understand how configurable this machine is trust me you want to build youring cables you see all of these ones yeah you see how it says load 2 3 4 5 6 7even yeah those are these guys okay so if these like overcurrent or something then would they blow their load no no you know what we'll go through it once we actually do a rundown of each of the modules um and I'll explain why those are important yeah check it out I made a whole thing oh they actually connect together that's Prett cool yeah that's not in but yeah that's what she said I think we should go bottom to top reason being because that's where power comes in so this is a 3,000 volt amp AC so we'll be able to test any PC power supply on the market and realistically just about any other power supply as well so this is also a three-phase power supply it can do both single and three-phase but we only have it hooked up for single phase right now because we're only targeting adx power supplies eventually we might do service stuff but that's in the future what's cool about this is it can do any anything with the power so it can do 240 volts 50 HZ for European Brothers it can do 11060 or 1260 for North America it can also start injecting like yeah can we simulate dirty power dirty power power like bad power so we can we can Brown out the power we can overvolt the power we can inject harmonics into the actual AC sine wave like if you had a blender or some crap running Elsewhere on the circuit like a very noisy like motor somewhere that like feeding very like dirty a blender yeah or microwave or something on the there's no motor in a microwave except it's been the turntable that's probably not the problem yeah probably the worst thing to compare it to but it it it can do that and it can do that all automatic thing what does this do all right so that's an onoff controller it turns stuff on and off um oh my god really that's all it does uh yeah what's this de short circuit protection and ovp tester so basically that will short out the power Supply the most fun test ever as well as it will overvolt the power supply so it takes this is one of our likely fire starters then right here maybe so what it does is it'll take voltage from the DC source and add it to the output from the power supply so if you're getting 12 volts out it will just like add a couple voltage to that and see if the power supply holy crap this is not supposed to be happening and and cut and cuts it yeah right you claim this is where things get interesting as we were talking about before this is the Anderson connection panel these all hook into these loads which we'll get to in a minute and that's basically the output of the AC source so that's where we plug power supplies into got it okay so after after adapting it from that to normal plug right so our AC source is as clean or dirty as we Speck it to be and this is effectively your wall outlet at home but you know with an adap well so the idea with this is to actually have a test enclosure that we put down here and plug into this or we even make a back plane that just slots in right cuz these are all very precisely put in place right so we could easily have like a PCB with Anderson connectors the PCB Mount ones not regular ones sure that we could just slide in and there's power these are all your signal stuff that goes up to um this guy and this guy yeah and these are all these and um these channels I believe are temperature sensing channels that is a byproduct of this guy Okay cool so this is basically the business end where we plug the victims in and the idea is that by having an enclosure here we can control the environment that the power supply is operating in so that we could run any number of different permutations clean power dirty power cold hot there's a more practical thing for an enclosure so when power supplies blow up we don't yeah that too this this yeah what's this point uh so it's a timing noise analyzer the module has a whole bunch of slots that you can stick into it what these do is Monitor all the signals right so if you have 12 volts 5 Vols and 3.3 this is monitoring it from a past fail event so we don't actually get data out of this so you set limits and this will see if it breaks those limits got it well where do we get data from then uh this guy okay oh and that's missing that's the oscilloscope I see they allow a variety of third party oscilloscopes we haven't decided on one yet but that's going to go there a four Channel oscilloscope and that will give you pretty graphs and like actual things that people can understand where this will give you the past fail data now here's something I need to understand a little bit better if our were l oh wait no I get it oh my God why do we need so many of them okay cool I spent the majority of time like gaming the system to get us this the idea of these is we have 400 WTS 400 wats 400 watts 400 wat 400 4 4 400 these are eight 400 WT loads and one dual 100 watt load so these Can it can do 200 Watts total but 100 on each channel the idea is this is for your 5 volts and your 3.3 most power supplies are under 100 Watts on those rails there are a few that are above only older stuff the newest stuff the 1600 watts can sometimes do 125 these loads can be connected in parallel right so you can set all of these guys to 12 vs the reason why I went with so many is something called slew rate so that's the rate at which these loads can change their demand right okay so each one of these loads can change the demand at 6 amps per microc so you take 6 amps you multiply by 12 you get uh 60 72 so 72 watts each one of these can change their load at 72 watts per micros with all eight of these loads we can change the the the rate of power draw at 760 watts per microc okay the idea was to electronically simulate 3090 kicking on but then Nvidia released 4090 and I was like I don't have enough space so the future goal is just to have a test bench right next to it where you can just literally hook the power supply instead of hooking into this hook it into an actual computer and simulate a real world example well think about that won't be as repeatable though no but think about it this way someone's complaining about a certain power supply blowing up under certain architecture you can build that architecture get the power supply put the power supply down and monitor the voltages as it's and then we could create a simulated load based on what we monitored and find out if anything will blow up you hide a guy to automate GPU testing just get him to get a script that cranks it to like 150% and just sends it as we get more experience using this I'm assuming we're going to come up with our own stuff cool and then what do these do so uh single phase power meter Yeah so basically efficiency so if we want if we want to test uh 80 whatever or maybe something more meaningful like 90 plus yeah sure okay so that that just monitors your power through and then this just looks like a basic ass multimeter yeah digital multimeter so it's got It's got a um if we have an oscilloscope do we need this there's a reason why we need it I've forgotten it um I'm going to blame I'm going to blame food again you know what I've forgotten our sponsor see Sonic man those guys never cease to amaze me great people great power supplies I mean clearly because if they didn't have the confidence to know this thing is going to make them look good rather than bad why would they have gotten involved in helping us Speck it this is like I said very similar to the unit they have although ours is a little bit newer unless they upgrade which means that if they're doing a great job of Designing their power supplies there shouldn't be any surprises so go check them out at the link down in the video description they've got long warranties great efficiency just they're quiet what what else can you ask for if you guys think Kyle and I are brutal with each other you wouldn't believe what doesn't make it into the videos we just uploaded an exclusive on float plane.com of me and Jake and it gets pretty spicy BMWs are bad cars Jake come at me\n"