I am very happy today; my SunMoon SM-268 has just arrived. This equipment is a power supply active load tester, which will enable us to perform true power supply reviews. As we have already explained, 99% of power supply reviews posted on the web are wrong.
I will be playing with this machine during the next days in order to master it. After that all our power supply reviews will have both the model we are currently using – i.e. completely disassembling the units to see the design and components used – and load testing to see if the power supply is really capable of delivering its labeled power. We still need to buy other stuff, like a thermometer to measure both the room temperature and the PSU internal temperature, a wattage meter to measure efficiency and an oscilloscope to see how much noise and ripple there are on the power supply outputs, if we want to cover these tests as well. This is a hell of an investment but I think that it will be worthwhile, especially when we think that are only a very few people doing this kind of in-depth power supply reviews today.
I plan to re-test all as much as power supplies we’ve covered in the past in order to update all our articles. The good thing about power supplies is that their life-span are far longer than other hardware parts, so what we could consider an “old” PSU review can help a lot of people, as the products are still available on the market. Also, I plan to create a table listing all power supplies we reviewed with the load tester showing the ones that were capable of delivering their rated power and the ones that weren’t. This table should be very handy for all users.
On the pictures below you have an overall look of my new load tester.
