Congrats to Aris for calling out these poor, shoddy products released by Gigabyte! Props also to Gamers Nexus for highlighting them as well. It's a shame that it took some lurid headlines ("Exploding PSU" was a favorite of mine) to finally get Gigabyte to issue a recall.
I wish mfgs would just focus on quality and stop replacing quality parts w/cheaper parts (sadly, too many examples here). If you have to wait for the quality component to come back into stock, it's okay - you don't need to produce an inferior product. Especially when the market you're in is already saturated.
Yeah, except it’s a limited voluntary recall with a bunch of stipulations attached, when it should probably be a mandatory recall with stop-use guidance. I agree with Aris, they have a fundamental design flaw, most likely they are missing appropriate resistance from gate to source and/or have mismatched components, leading to unpredictable switching behavior, which is why the PSU, in his instance, popped right after he was load testing. Meaning on power down followed by power up, there was some kind of drain to source occurring, or mismatched timing, which caused the driver IC to switch to the wrong state and, subsequently, the fireworks of exploding fets occurred.
None of this is reliant on overload stress testing, it could be a number of different power events and environmental factors that could lead to this condition, e.g. machine hang followed by rapid power on/off cycle, load cycling of components, issues on the AC input side (fluctuations in AC voltage), could all be part of exciting the problem in the PSU. What shouldn’t happen is the exploding part - not ever.
Significant reported incidents of things exploding isn’t indicative of a manufacturing defect, it’s a strong indicator of a design defect, because the design should prevent this. This is why violently exploding PSU’s almost never happen. Even the cheapest old Antec ketchup & mustard PSU’s (which used to fail pretty darn regularly) generally failed in a safe manner (e.g. non explosively). Steve’s tear-down and comparison of different components, being used across different examples of these PSU’s, would indicate that this isn’t a specific part issue that’s relegated to a specific production run. I’m going to guess that Gigabyte finally tested a few units from a specific run, got a failure result, and decided to recall from that run (because, legally, if they did otherwise, then they’d really be in hot water upon discovery - and believe me, subpoena’s are coming for them eventually).
So again, Aris is most likely right: Gigabyte is facing a fundamental design-flaw with this line of PSU’s, due to having gone with an inexperienced contract vendor that appears to have since disappeared. Gigabyte, being fully unprepared to deal with this problem (due to not having proper crisis handling know-how), is going about this all wrong. They continue to obfuscate the issue with claims that the testing regimen was the cause of exploding PSU’s, that they’re fine under normal conditions, and they effectively are trying to blame misuse (and customers) as the cause.
Why? Because they suspect they have an increasingly serious liability problem and they’d have to backtrack significantly, thus now increasing their liability. Whereas, if they’d just worked earlier to get ahead of this issue, starting with examining Aris’s sample, they’d have been acting responsibly, thus decreasing their exposure (e.g. the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol model).
Ultimately, they need to pull the product from the market, issue a full-line recall and stop-use guidance, before one of these things starts a serious fire. This is going to be expensive for them, as it appears they have no contract OEM with which to share or shunt costs, since the actual manufacturer appears to have gone out of business. But Gigabyte is a two billion dollar company, and if they wish to remain as such, they need to suck it up and start dealing with this problem properly.
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