Discussion PSU recommendations and power supply discussion thread - Tom's hardware

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I think the Corsair CX550 both the cwt and greatwall vesion was a little better in ripple suppresion than the GQ but i maybe mistaken , anyway both of them are simiraly priced to the GD and have reliable reviews
 
Considering the fact that EVGA's unreviewed units like the N1, W1 and B1 have historically all been fairly bad, regardless of whether any budget EVGA model actually IS bad or not, I'd avoid it on general principle alone because without a reliable review to say that it's NOT a firebomb like the B3 units or something that's likely to be fairly short lived like the N1 and W1 models when used with more than integrated graphics, it's a very risky proposition.
 
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I really like EVGA as a company, but even I have to admit that they are being intentionally obtuse when it comes to understanding that this kind of saturation of a specific segment of the market is not beneficial to them OR to others in the industry. I'd bet that at some level of management there is somebody who believes that if you put enough products on the market you will sell more by the mere fact that you've increased the number of choices of YOUR product, versus your competititors. Unfortunately, in the real world, all that does is confuse people and piss them off because you are trying to obfuscate their options.
 
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Mezoxin said:
I do hope well known brands dont do the same
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Darkbreeze said:
Yeah, shrek. I remember that. No major brand name would pull that, at least not outright, or they'd get tarred and feathered right out of the market. Word of mouth is a serious killer in this industry.
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Actually, one, very well known brand has done this several times and they are still in business. Of course not with PSUs but with MoBos and that brand is Gigabyte.

Gigabyte is notorious with their MoBo revisions and on many instances the next revision of same MoBo is worse than the previous version.
Few links:
Hardwareinfo (had to use WBM since original page is gone): https://web.archive.org/web/2015071...sions-present-markedly-different-test-results
Guru3D: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/gigabyte-pushing-it-a-motherboard-revision-too-far,3.html
HardwareBBQ: https://www.hardwarebbq.com/differe...evisions-raise-serious-questions/#ert_pane1-1

As far as i know, Gigabyte is the only (MoBo) manufacturer who's product revisions aren't upgrades but downgrades. And by the time user buys the MoBo, they get the downgraded version which is shadow of former self.
 
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Yeah, obviously, or at least it should have been, I was talking about power supplies, not other hardware. They do this crap with other hardware all the time, especially motherboards. And ALL of them are guilty of revisions that are worse than the originals at some time or another.
 
Oh, I think it's full fledged fraud. Maybe a different KIND of fraud, but still fraud. When you say you are selling somebody a thing and then give them a different thing, whether obviously or sneakily, it is the same thing, deception and fraud. Just two different ways of perpetrating the fraud.
 
Darkbreeze said:
Oh, I think it's full fledged fraud. Maybe a different KIND of fraud, but still fraud. When you say you are selling somebody a thing and then give them a different thing, whether obviously or sneakily, it is the same thing, deception and fraud. Just two different ways of perpetrating the fraud.
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I would agree. I couldn't see a brand like Samsung doing this with ssds or a brand like SeaSonic with PSUs
 
Just another reason why I have never been a fan of Adata. They are a cheapo, scandalous, fly by night type outfit if you ask me. I have never purchased any Adata product, and despite the fact that Tom's hardware tries very hard to force their recommendations for Adata storage devices down our throats, I never will. I trust them even less than Team, but maybe just a little more than OLoY, whom I also would never buy anything from.
 
Darkbreeze said:
Just another reason why I have never been a fan of Adata. They are a cheapo, scandalous, fly by night type outfit if you ask me. I have never purchased any Adata product, and despite the fact that Tom's hardware tries very hard to force their recommendations for Adata storage devices down our throats, I never will. I trust them even less than Team, but maybe just a little more than OLoY, whom I also would never buy anything from.
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And personally i doubt i will be buying any Kingston products for myself either. My A400 was a gift to begin with.

I am still waiting on a warranty replacement for my Kingston A400 to arrive.

The drive died on Thanksgiving when it was less than a year old and kingston was closed on black friday so it took awhile till they responded to my rma request. The rest of the process was slow and involved me paying shipping to send the SSD to them. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of kingston anymore.

As least they didn't flag me for the broken warranty sticker.

Meanwhile my brothers ancient system has a small Crucial BX200 drive. No problems whatsoever, even though its a budget crucial model tyat is 4 times as old as my a400. Then there is 2 intel 660ps and an MX500 in the laptops around the house. Have not had issues with any.
 
Darkbreeze said:
Just another reason why I have never been a fan of Adata. They are a cheapo, scandalous, fly by night type outfit if you ask me. I have never purchased any Adata product, and despite the fact that Tom's hardware tries very hard to force their recommendations for Adata storage devices down our throats, I never will. I trust them even less than Team, but maybe just a little more than OLoY, whom I also would never buy anything from.
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+1 to that.

I once bought Adata USB flash drive (2GB in size) and that died less than year in use and i didn't use mine that much either. Learned my lesson and now, only USB flash drives i buy are Kingston. Still have my old Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 (8GB) in working conditions but after 8 or so years, i retired it due to the small capacity. Now, i'm using Kingston HyperX Savage (128GB) as my USB flash drive.
NightHawkRMX said:
And personally i doubt i will be buying any Kingston products for myself either. My A400 was a gift to begin with.

I am still waiting on a warranty replacement for my Kingston A400 to arrive.

The drive died on Thanksgiving when it was less than a year old and kingston was closed on black friday so it took awhile till they responded to my rma request. The rest of the process was slow and involved me paying shipping to send the SSD to them. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of kingston anymore.

As least they didn't flag me for the broken warranty sticker.

Meanwhile my brothers ancient system has a small Crucial BX200 drive. No problems whatsoever, even though its a budget crucial model tyat is 4 times as old as my a400. Then there is 2 intel 660ps and an MX500 in the laptops around the house. Have not had issues with any.
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Kingston with it's SSDs is like Be Quiet! with it's PSUs, you need to know which ones are good. E.g i have Kingston HyperX 3K (240GB) SSD which has served me reliably for 4 years now. But with SSDs, you're better off with Samsung or Crucial drive rather than trying to find which Kingston SSD is the good one.
Though, Kingston USB flash drives, SD/microSD memory cards and RAM are very solid with good performance. I have several those Kingston products in use and i have 0 issues with them. In some sense, Kingston is like MSI, where Kingston it excels in flash drives, memory cards and RAMs but does poorly on SSDs. MSI excels in MoBos, GPUs and monitors production but their PSUs were complete crap.

Speaking of MSI (and getting back to the topic), i know that their PSUs were complete failure but what i don't know, who was the OEM of MSI PSUs? I even haven't seen any of the MSI PSUs. Anyone willing to give some backstory about MSI PSUs?
 
Aeacus said:
I once bought Adata USB flash drive (2GB in size) and that died less than year in use and i didn't use mine that much either.
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I had a PNY 128gb USB drive die within 3 months. Warranty process was seamless tho.
Aeacus said:
Speaking of MSI (and getting back to the topic), i know that their PSUs were complete failure but what i don't know, who was the OEM of MSI PSUs? I even haven't seen any of the MSI PSUs. Anyone willing to give some backstory about MSI PSUs?
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I haven't heard of them, not even in MSI prebuilts. Odd.

One brand that makes PSUs that i never realized was reddragon.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2695/9506/products/GC-PS003_4_450x450.jpg?v=1558423148
I have only ever seen one mentioned on one post here. There isn't much info out there on them.

An what Jon said in that post mentioning the Redragon PSU was not very positive. A very old design and just fine design all around. But that was just one model.
 
Darkbreeze said:
The CX and CXm units are ok as a budget option, but I do not recommend pairing them with gaming cards. The newer 2017 models of CX and CXm are better than the older ones, but still not what we'd call terrific. Even so, in a real financial pinch, or if there are simply no other good models available to you, then the GRAY label Corsair CX and CXM units are passable.
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I feel you are being a little more negative towards Corsair CX grey units.

The 550w is the sweet spot, yet I fail to find a review of a Corsair CX550, only the inferior CX550m.

However, the CX450 and 550w is often very cheap in comparison to comparable units and i find myself often recommending it.

For one thing, it actually qualifies to be 80+ silver efficient, but is marketed as bronze. Based on toms CX450 testing, the 80+ silver efficiency is likely on 230w with the CX550.
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?16610-Corsair-CX-and-CX-M-quot-cheat-sheet-quot

Also, it is not group regulated, which is better than its competitors.
Fully DC-DC and Haswell ready.
It is not Double Forward based unlike its CX550m brother.

Looking at the Corsair CX450 review by TH, they hardily had anything bad to say about it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-cx450-psu,5678.html
They said
  • Single PCIe connector limits expansion
  • Not as quiet as the CWT-made CX450
  • Short distance between peripheral connectors
Single PCIe connector doesn't really matter for this PSU. Any GPU requiring more than a single 8 pin probably requires more than 450w anyhow.
Not being quiet is a valid complaint to be concidered in judgement, but not really a problem with how well this PSU can power a system.
A short distance between peripheral connectors is somewhat irrelevent to performance of a PSU. Plus, MOLEX connectores are basically not used anymore, so this isn't really an issue for the vast, vast majority of systems.

The capacitors are not very good brands at all, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue as i don't really hear anything about failures and the overall performance is good despite these caps.

Overall its seems to punch above its weight class and outperform even pricier PSUs. Far better than the Corsair VS aswell.
 
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I have never heard of, or seen, an MSI power supply. I don't think they exist and if they do, they had to have been extremely few, for an extremely short period of time and in an extremely limited regionally available supply.

Kingston, Sandisk, Samsung and Crucial/Micron are all trustworthy for the most part when it comes to flash drives and SD cards. I'll buy SSDs from three of those four, none of which starts with a K.

PNY is the white label with black lettering version of generic when it comes to memory and storage hardware. If supermarkets in the old days had sold computer hardware, you'd have found PNY products on the section that looked like this:

Generic-Packaging-Design-Retail1.jpg



Some will argue, but I don't care. PNY is a bargain basement company and the products they offer are good as OEM parts in some cases or in a serious pinch if it's all you can get locally, which sometimes it IS, but I would never seek them out and I'd make every effort to find something else before settling on so much as an 8GB flash drive or 4GB stick of SODIMM.

I certainly wouldn't buy or use their SSDs unless I needed one for something I was selling off as cheap as possible.
 
NightHawkRMX said:
I feel you are being a little more negative towards Corsair CX grey units.

The 550w is the sweet spot, yet I fail to find a review of a Corsair CX550, only the inferior CX550m.

However, the CX450 and 550w is often very cheap in comparison to comparable units and i find myself often recommending it.

For one thing, it actually qualifies to be 80+ silver efficient, but is marketed as bronze. Based on toms CX450 testing, the 80+ silver efficiency is likely on 230w with the CX550.
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?16610-Corsair-CX-and-CX-M-quot-cheat-sheet-quot

Also, it is not group regulated, which is better than its competitors.
Fully DC-DC and Haswell ready.
It is not Double Forward based unlike its CX550m brother.

Looking at the Corsair CX450 review by TH, they hardily had anything bad to say about it.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-cx450-psu,5678.html
They said
  • Single PCIe connector limits expansion
  • Not as quiet as the CWT-made CX450
  • Short distance between peripheral connectors
Single PCIe connector doesn't really matter for this PSU. Any GPU requiring more than a single 8 pin probably requires more than 450w anyhow.
Not being quiet is a valid complaint to be concidered in judgement, but not really a problem with how well this PSU can power a system.
A short distance between peripheral connectors is somewhat irrelevent to performance of a PSU. Plus, MOLEX connectores are basically not used anymore, so this isn't really an issue for the vast, vast majority of systems.

The capacitors are not very good brands at all, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue as i don't really hear anything about failures and the overall performance is good despite these caps.

Overall its seems to punch above its weight class and outperform even pricier PSUs. Far better than the Corsair VS aswell.
Click to expand...

Yes, they are ok. No, they are not great.
 
Darkbreeze said:
I have never heard of, or seen, an MSI power supply. I don't think they exist and if they do, they had to have been extremely few, for an extremely short period of time and in an extremely limited regionally available supply.
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Did some Google-Fu and found a review of MSI TurboStream 600W PSU (basically rebadged Solytech SL-8600EPS),
link: https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/msi-turbostream-600-w-power-supply-review/

And this forum topic via WBM where OklahomaWolf clears things up about MSI PSUs. There's some backstory in there about the Solytech as well,
link: https://web.archive.org/web/20110829024152/http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/t265961.html

Apparently, there were available in USA but with very strange warranty with 16 months from MFG date, not from purchase date. 😵
 
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