Who's Who In Power Supplies, 2014: Brands Vs. Manufacturers

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The thing i find most interesting in these who's who articles is Thermaltake. Such a range of manufacturers, that generally corresponds to quality of product in reviews. Shame that such a well known company can have such a varying range of quality. But as always, good article, nice to know who is doing what.
 

arunphilip

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Wow, this was very informative and educative - kudos on such a comprehensive article. I'm now itching to go home and check the various PSUs I have in my Dells at home (IIRC, they're Lite-On) and look at the UL data.
 

avarice

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Good article with an amazing presentation of information in the charts. Well done.

With the caveots given about brands and quality - would it be unreasonable to suggest staying with a brand that manufactures it's own PSUs? I am refering to the FSPs, SeaSonics and Zippys on the list. I have had FSP and have heard very glowing praise about the other two brands.

Also does the quality of their products meet or exceed the brands that are subcontracted to them - OR do some of the designs from other brands that use these three companies exceed even those of the three mentioned brands? For example - is there a case where say 'Named Brand Company' design as manufactured by FSP exceeds the quality of any FSP branded PSU?
 

randomstar

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I still see incorrect information with respect to logisys- they are sold in the houston area by several vendors, and distributed in cases, and as over the counter parts at a local distro house.. they have in every model I tested proven to be the worst of the worst. when you see a 450 watt for under 20 bucks, and a unit labeled as 600 for under 30, you know something is up.
 

avarice

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Good article with an amazing presentation of information in the charts. Well done.

With the caveots given about brands and quality - would it be unreasonable to suggest staying with a brand that manufactures it's own PSUs? I am refering to the FSPs, SeaSonics and Zippys on the list. I have had FSP and have heard very glowing praise about the other two brands.

Also does the quality of their products meet or exceed the brands that are subcontracted to them - OR do some of the designs from other brands that use these three companies exceed even those of the three mentioned brands? For example - is there a case where say 'Named Brand Company' design as manufactured by FSP exceeds the quality of any FSP branded PSU?
 

lp231

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Informative article, but when it comes to buying a PSU most of us look at the branding first and then find out who makes it. XION is made by Super Flower and Super Flower makes good PSUs, but many of us would probably not pick XION as our very first choice. We usually go with more popular brands like Corsair, Antec, Seasonic, etc.
 
My rules are simple, simply avoid buying Chinese wherever possible.
I understand almost everything is made there, but Western companies understand Western standards of quality.

The whole Chinese business model is based on manufacturing crap and making it hard to return.

I almost put off my younger brother's build because I had to get a ThermalTake PSU, but he didn't have enough money to get a different one, so I figured I'd get the warranty and hope for the best.

Western is the only thing worth buying because Chinese means Chinese quality, and that's an oxymoron.
 

Avus

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I always found using "weight" is ONE of the easy way to find out the quality of a power supply... Try pick up a $30 550W power supply on one hand and a 80+ 550W on the other hand...
 

Damn_Rookie

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What about the norm of a Western company selling Chinese made goods though? Surely, if the 'Western companies understand Western standards of quality', as you say, they wouldn't dream of selling something that doesn't live up to their Western standards, right?

While your rule may sound like a sensible one in theory, you really need to keep in mind that manufacturing in China these days (like most other places) is based around building to a cost. If that cost, specified by the buyer (the company who will sell the product to the consumer), is realistically too low for what they want, they're going to get a low quality product. On the other hand, if the buyer specifies certain quality factors they want, and costs the product realistically, the product manufactured for them can be of very high quality.

So while it's easy to write off everything manufactured in China as being junk, that's really not fair. Items manufactured there do vary massively in quality, and that quality is signed off on by the company (western or not) that then sells the product, so they're just as culpable for any quality issues as the manufacturer.

At its simplest, I guess you could say it all comes down to that oft said cliche: you get what you pay for.
 


The difference is that Western companies understand the end goal is something that's in good enough condition to run and not to ship broken crap that is cheap beyond a reasonable standard and make it hard to return. You won't catch them selling crap simply to make a quick buck like the Chinese do.

Western companies have a sense of honesty and duty to the customer; the Chinese companies not only understand, but they also happily exploit caveat emptor.

Western companies also have far better R&D and specs, so it makes sense the end product would be better than a Chinese-created and manufactured one. There's a very simple reason that Chinese made items are of such poor quality. It's a business strategy there.

Do you think a Western company could survive by being cheats?
 

falchard

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I think Thermaltake's case is due to their sales volume and company age. With an older PSU maker its only natural they will have a lot more models with a lot of different manufacturing partners. Due to their volume, they are probably unable to get 1 producer to do all their PSUs. They probably also want to have many different producers in order to shop around and decrease risk of a mass failure rate.
I think this has worked out well for Thermaltake considering their relatively low failure rate compared to other PSU labels.
 

Fishwithadeagle

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So I have an honest question for everyone here. My system is a modded dell xps 8500 with the stock 460 watt psu. It is an acbel e131875 el number. I have a core i7-3770, 4dimm 1600 mhz ram, three hard drives, two dvd drives, a couple of low power sata chips and fans, along with a 7870 hawk. There are ample spots on the psu to fit all of these components, but I don't want to have a catastrophic failure over here, so is this psu good enough?
 
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