Avoid Bad Power Supplies! How to REALLY Buy the BEST PSU 2021 | Best Power Supply 2021

you've got everything else picked out for your build but you're confused about the power supply how many watts do you need what's the difference between gold bronze and platinum ratings can you buy any power supply or does build quality matter don't worry we're going to go through all this and more including specific product recommendations coming right up [Music] hi welcome back to pc builder i'm jason today we're going to go over what has to be one of the absolutely most confusing things about putting together your pc build which is what power supply do you need how many watts what's the 80 plus gold mean does it matter if you buy whatever is it going to blow up and explode your build we're going to go through all of this and we're going to dispel a lot of the misconceptions about this and get you from where you're at now to specific product recommendations so you can buy something coming out of this video and feel really really confident about it of course that's what this channel is all about it's about mashing down the technical details to give you the best price to performance in your builds if that's the kind of content you want more of and you want to support remember to like the video subscribe and click the bell icon it really does make a big difference to the channel as we grow and it's a free way for you to support us and get what you need so with that let's jump right into it let's go over some power supply basics the first thing to know is that most companies that sell the power supplies aren't the ones manufacturing it so when you get something that looks like this you might think that evga has manufactured this well guess what they have it they bought it from another manufacturer so i would tell you forget the brand names focus in on the particular unit that you're looking for and focus in on the reviews of that unit and we'll get to that in a second secondly there are two main sizes for power supplies the first size is atx size that's going to cover 95 percent of you they're going to build in an atx case then of course there are sfx sized power supplies those are for small form factor builds itx cases if you don't know your case manufacturer will have specs and they will specify what size power supply fits in their case i'm going to guess more often than not unless it's a small form factor it's going to be an atx size case then there are three different types of power supplies to buy the first one is fully modular that means it doesn't come with any cables pre-attached to it you plug them in to the side you can see that right there the second one is semi-modular this comes with the core cables already hardwired and the rest of them you can plug in and the core cables are typically like the 20 plus 4 pin or often referred to the 24 pin uh power cable for the motherboard the four plus four pin often referred to as the eight pin power connector for the cpu sometimes the pcie cables but really it's the core stuff then of course there are the non-modular power supplies that just come with a big wad of cables on them now listen if it were up to me i would buy fully modular every single time semi-modular is also good it just helps keep the builds clean but it doesn't impact the performance so if you want to go ahead and buy a non-modular power supply go right ahead you'll just have a little extra cable management to do but on a super cheap build maybe 10 15 makes a difference and that might help you out so how do you determine how many watts you need this is actually probably the easiest part of buying a power supply and i'm going to show you how you're going to put your build in a pc part picker just like this one right here and i'm not sponsored by them but they're a wonderful tool they're going to tell you the effectively kind of the max draw if you want to think about it that way right here and if you click on it it'll tell you you know for per each component but we just want to look at that total number which for us is just about 300 watts so we're going to take that number and we're actually going to size our power supply up by 50 so we're going to multiply 300 times 1.5 that is use your calculator if you got to that's right 450 watts that's the smallest power supply we want now we could get a 500 watt six you know 550 that would be fine but we want somewhere in that neighborhood of 450 watts or higher okay so what about all this efficiency rating stuff so 80 plus is a certification done by a third party that takes the power supply and actually tests it it tests it at different load factors on the power supply to determine how efficient is this power supply and it has to be at least eighty percent at three different test points typically twenty fifty and a hundred percent in order for it to get eighty plus white most of the power supplies you're going to find that are higher quality are going to be bronze rated or better and most of the really good ones are going to be gold platinum or titanium however don't think for a second that just because you buy a gold rated unit it means it's better than a bronze rated unit that's not necessarily the case it could be that the bronze rated unit has much better internal components and protections than that gold rated unit so we'll talk in a second about how to determine the build quality but for right now the percentage difference between these is very small you will not see most of the energy savings in terms of real dollars if you were buying a thousand systems or a hundred systems maybe you would and maybe it would make a difference between bronze and gold i would just say get something at least bronze rated and you're going to find that as you go into higher and higher quality they're automatically going to be gold platinum or titanium but don't fret the overall efficiency rating as long as you get something that's bronze or better this brings us to the most important thing to talk about which is build quality of the power supply now if you can't tell the build quality from the 80 plus certification gold bronze whatever and you can't just tell by how many watts it's going to give you how the heck do you tell well the reality is that you and me can't we can't tell just by looking at a unit we could tear it apart and take a look but unless you're an electrical engineer or really understand power supplies you're probably not going to glean much from that so what goes into build quality well number one is the quality of the components themselves these are the capacitors are they high quality are they crappy they're going to blow up the second thing that goes into it are the protections what do i mean by protections well there are built-in protections in your power supply hopefully that will prevent things going wrong and going badly when something gets out of whack and that they include things like overpower protection over temperature protection under volt protection and just a number of others the way that most of us tell this is by looking at reviews and i'm going to give you a dead simple site right now in order to do that this is the psu tier list over at linus tech tips forums under psus this is a community developed and maintained list where they've developed a methodology for build quality i strongly recommend that you use this and i will include a link to this down in the description and i want to take this opportunity to a big shout out to everybody who works on this and maintains it because without it most of us would be absolutely lost there's three different tiers in here that i want you to focus on because they break them out into tiers each tier has a certain requirement in terms of the protections that are required in terms of the the ripple on the voltage all kinds of different things that increase the quality of the psu unit so for super budget systems we're actually going to scroll all the way down here and you are going to use something out of tier c anything below this is garbage or for a system that does not have a dedicated gpu but if you are putting together a super cheap gaming system that has a dedicated gpu you're going to use something out of t or c and you can see that they've listed it by manufacturer here and then they've listed here the units so you can quickly search by manufacturer name jump down each tier and you can find the unit that you're looking for tier b is going to be good for mid-range systems this is systems probably all the way up to the latest graphics cards that we're using now just below that and finally tier a is what i would recommend if you're going to heavily overclock your system or if you're using one of the fancy new rx 6800 x 6800 or rtx 3070 or better graphics cards or you're using a cpu that you know is going to suck up a lot of power like an i 9 10 900 k so you're going to come here and it's really simple to search so if you know what power supply you're looking for you can literally just use the control f's feature in google chrome or your browser and just type in what you want to find so if i want to find the seasonic unit i just type in seasonic and it'll pull up it starts with tier a and i can just keep clicking down and clicking down and clicking down until i find the unit that i'm looking for it's really that simple to use now there are a lot of abbreviations in here so it might take you a little while but trust me the time is worth it all right now let's put all our knowledge together here and actually get a power supply so we're back to our budget build here with our four core uh processor and rx 570 build this is a super budget build i think this is like a 530 dollar build so we're gonna find something in t or c we remember that 300 watts is what pc part picker after we put all of our parts in is telling us that this build is going to draw we're going to multiply that by 1.5 so that's going to give us 450 watts we're now going to come here in pc part picker and under the power supply we're going to add a power supply so what we're going to do is we're going to look for something that is bronze rated or better and 450 watts or better now do we care about modular semi-modular if we do we can we can put that in here but for budget system like this we don't care because we just want cheap right so we're going to sort from lowest to highest we're going to find a couple of units in here one we're going to find is evga br this is not a bad power supply it is however listed under the units that they don't have all the information on for trc so let's just say we wanted to search this one though evga br this is the uh 450 watt version we're going to go over to the linus tech psu cultist list and we're going to hit control f and we're going to pull up evga now uh we'll start whoops i got to spell that right evga we're going to start all the way at the top and work our way down so it's not a supernova it's none of these right here and this is the obviously tier a it's none of these right here we're going to keep going down it's none of these here in tier b we're going to keep going down none of these here in tier b under the units they don't have a lot of information on going down to t or c here's the tier c for low low priority units or where they don't have a ton of extra information and it is listed right here this is a tier c i wouldn't i wouldn't fret pulling a a unit out of here if you can pull a unit that's not out of here that's great so maybe we go back and decide okay well that's not the unit that we want to get and we can go down and we can keep checking these units until we find one we like one we're going to find that we like is the corsair cx this is going to this unit here is going to appear on the c list not on the regular c list 450 watt power supply this is exactly what we need for our build we're just going to go ahead and add it it's a cheap unit and there we go we've put all of our knowledge together now if we had a higher end build like a you know rtx 3080 build or something like that we would then want to get a power supply that was at least in the eight tier so in order to make this easier on ourselves instead of just searching for units that are bronze rated or better because the higher quality units are going to be automatically gold because they're going to cost more so why not make them gold we're going to get rid of the bronze and we'd search using this methodology and then i'll just cut out some of the stuff that we have to get rid of as we search now this will take a while i'm not going to lie to you but you will be able to find good units and now i want to give you a couple units down in the description at each tier tier a tier b and tier c that are good rated units at different power sizes i'm going to include them down there you don't have to necessarily search for this you could just use those links as well because i want to make sure that you walk away from this video with something that you can buy right now if you've got value on this video please remember to give it a like and of course if this is the kind of content that you want content that mashes down all the technical details to give you the best price to performance in your builds then absolutely subscribe and click the bell icon and i'll catch you on the next one [Music]

Channel: PC Builder

Views: 478,390

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Id: 6xfN9ZG6xM4

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021