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450w-500w PSU Battle Royal

You guys asked, "What about regular mid-range PSUs?" So we bought five power supplies and then tested them to see if they would do what they were advertised to do. A melting fiery mess proves you get what you pay for. 5 PSU enter, 1 PSU leave.

Load Testing

For those of you that are curious as to some of the reasoning and equipment behind our PSU testing program here at HardOCP, we have put together a living document that shares a lot of the behind the scenes of the program. The testing we are conducting today is exactly as described in that document and will begin with a range of loads tested at 120v input including our torture test and then move on to the same set of tests at 100v input but without the torture test.

120v Load Testing Results

100v Load Testing Results

Test #1 is equal to approximately 25% of the rated capacity of the Apevia ATX-AS500W-BL at 45c. This makes Test #1 equal to 135w by loading the 12v rails to a combined 8a, the 5v rail to 3a, the 3.3v rail to 3a, the +5vsb to 2a, and the -12v to 0.5a. The results of Test #1 at both 100v and 120v were similar with no significant drops between the two tests in output voltages, however the Apevia unit has started off testing on the lower end of the ATX specification for output voltages on the 12v rails. The efficiency of this unit starts at between 70% and 72% which is certainly lower than we have seen in many other reviews and is not good in this era.

Test #2 is equal to approximately 50% of the rated capacity of the Apevia ATX-AS500W-BL at 45c. This makes Test #2 equal to 241w by loading the 12v rails to a combined 16a, the 5v rail to 5a, the 3.3v rail to 5a, the +5vsb to 2a, and the -12v to 0.5a. Test #2 was very similar to Test #1 with a few notable exceptions. 12v2 has dropped below the ATX specification for minimum voltage at 12.31v at 120v and 12.30v at 100v. The units efficiency however has come up to ~71% to ~72% at both 100v and 120v while the unit is exhausting at temperatures around 51c.

Test #3 is equal to approximately 75% of the rated capacity of the Apevia ATX-AS500W-BL at 45c. This makes Test #3 equal to 353w by loading the 12v rail to 24a, the 5v rail to 8a, the 3.3v rail to 9a, the +5vsb to 2a, and the -12v to 0.5a. Test #3 sees the bad from Test #2 only get worse. 12v1 and 12v2 are both now out of ATX specification with 12v2 dropping as low as 11.08v at 100v. The efficiency has plummeted to between 65.37% and 66.60% while exhaust temperatures have jumped to between 67c-68c. At this point the unit has also begun to melt and smell horrible.

It should be noted that I stopped testing on the first Apevia unit we had after Test #3 because the unit began to melt. I could not completely identify where the unit was melting from nor photograph it very well because the unit had to remain in tact in order to get an RMA as these units were purchased at retail. However, the second unit we received also began to melt during Test #3 but not nearly as badly and from what appeared to be a different location. This time the melting was obviously from some of the caulk used to secure the components on the PCB. It would seem that the temperature rating by Apevia may have been for a good reason, however it should be noted that even at these temperatures the manufacturer should not be using caulk or plastics that should melt. This unit is supposedly UL certified and if so I would be interested to find out how that happened.

On the performance side of the load testing, the Apevia was a wreck. Neither unit would power up with any load greater than the Test #3 numbers which may be a good thing as the units were melting during Test #3. With only a 50% load the unit violated the ATX specification for output voltages, and during the 75% test the units 12v rails dropped as low as 11.08v. Output voltages at this level would most likely result in unstable systems if the systems would boot at all. To make matters worse the units efficiency was never good only peaking at 72.59% (50% load at 120v) while dropping as low as 65.37% (75% load at 100v). With these limited number of tests completed lets go ahead and see if the DC output quality fared any better than the output voltages, and build quality.