Introduction

We were one of the first hardware review websites to alert users that the vast majority of power supply reviews posted around the web and even on so-called “specialized” magazines were completely wrong. If you want to understand why, please read our article Why 99% of Power Supply Reviews are Wrong. This is recommended reading to understand why we are adopting the methodology described in the present article.

Instead of doing like other websites that post worthless reviews we decided to take a different approach on our website while we still hadn’t the necessary equipment to make true power supply reviews: completely disassembling power supplies and talking about the architecture used and the rating of all internal components. With this we could have an idea if at least in theory the power supply could deliver its rated power.

We finally bought all the necessary equipment to make a true power supply review and in this article we will explain in details how we will be making our reviews from now on. We will basically keep our current format – i.e. we will continue disassembling power supplies and talking about their internals – adding the following tests:

• Load tests to see if the power supply is able to deliver its rated power and if it can deliver even more power than labeled;
• Protection tests to see if protections like over current, over power and short-circuit are working correctly;
• Electrical noise tests to see how clean is each power supply voltage output;
• Efficiency tests to see how much power is wasted by the power supply;
• Stability tests to see if there is any voltage fluctuation on the power supply;
• Temperature readings.

We will explain in details each one of these tests, the methodology we are going to use with each one of them, our criteria to label a power supply as “good” or “bad”, the equipment we are going to use and the known “flaws” on our methodology – basically what we could be doing differently to make “perfect” reviews (even though we know from our experience that even if we had the best equipment in the world some people would still find ways to criticize us).

The good news is that since power supplies are components that have a far higher market life span than other internal components like CPU, video cards and motherboards we will be updating as many “First Look” articles on power supplies we have published as we can, adding the above tests in order to upgrade them to a full review, giving them our award seals if they really deserve any of them. Since we still have with us several of the power supplies we reviewed in the past, this will be very interesting to compare what we have said about the power supply internal architecture with its performance in the real world.

The idea of this article is to be a reference for all our power supply reviews, so we won’t need to explain our methodology all over again in each review.

Total or partial reproduction of the contents of this site, as well as that of the texts available for downloading, be this in the electronic media, in print, or any other form of distribution, is expressly forbidden. Those who do not comply with these copyright laws will be indicted and punished according to the International Copyrights Law.

We do not take responsibility for material damage of any kind caused by the use of information contained in Hardware Secrets.