Beginners Guide to Power Supplies... How to understand the ratings

no your power supply is not power limiting your graphics card that's why today we're going to go ahead and talk about some of the basics regarding power supplies because i'm getting a lot of messages now with people asking me a lot of very basic things about power supplies so i figure it's time to do a little refresher course nzxt's starter pc series now starts at 699 dollars and gives you everything you need to get into the world of pc available in multiple configurations the starter pc can be tailored to meet your budget and needs and are the perfect way to build a work or learn from home setup while still being capable of 1080p 60fps gaming and popular titles like fortnite rainbow six siege and league of legends all of nzxt pcs come back with a two year warranty on parts labor and ram overclocking helping to guarantee the best gaming possible for your build to see the full list of specs and pricing on the nzxt starter pc series click the link in the description below you know there's nothing really glamorous about power supplies everyone loves to brag about their cpu their gpu heck even their motherboard these days but you know power supplies are extremely important they supply power to everything in your system and if they're terrible at their job well your system's gonna also perform terrible if it doesn't get blown up by a terrible power supply let's go and address that real quick cheap power supplies are not so much more prone to blowing up your system as they are prone to blowing up their own components a lot of the things that make a power supply more expensive than another are must haves versus nice to haves now must-haves in my opinion are things like high quality capacitors high quality power delivery components inside of the power supply remember the power supply is also regulating the power down from the power coming in from your wall now here in the united states we use 120 volt uh or 110 120 for pretty much everything whereas in europe it's even more important because they often are running on a 220 volt system which is a much higher step down for the power supply so the power supply is doing two things it's applying power to your components i.e the motherboard the cpu the gpu the sata the peripherals molex 4 pins all that sort of stuff fans it's all getting voltages either through a 12 volt 5 volt or 3 volt system coming out of your power supply but it's also responsible for being a transformer transforming all of that alternating current coming from your wall into a direct current uh 12 volt that your computer can use if this fails at doing that job then that's when you see things like fires happen components get burned up and or just straight up dead systems that don't turn on anymore because it could have happened when you were asleep in the system sitting there idle or off in a sleep state getting suddenly just injected with way more power than it was ever intended to have so a must-have in my opinion is a good quality power supply with good quality components now how do you know if it's a good quality component how do you know if it's a good power supply well there's something called an 80 plus rating and that basically goes way back in the day when anything considered 80 percent efficient was considered a good power supply well if you fast forward now to 2021 something that's 80 efficient is a pretty terrible power supply considering the improvement of components over the years and its efficiency ratings has led to way more colors or metals of the spectrum being 80 plus uh white now which is just the basic 80 plus silver or actually 80 plus bronze 80 plus silver 80 plus gold 80 plus titanium 80 plus platinum i think that's actually platinum the titanium what each of those represent an efficiency factor now the only way you can get more efficient with your power supply is being uh better at doing its job now what does it mean when it talks about efficiency well that basically means the rated max delivery of these power supplies whether this one be a 650 watt the revolt pro here being a 1000 watt or evga 1600 t2 titanium 1600 watt that's referring to the efficiency at which the power it draws from the wall to give you its max rated delivery so is it pulling 650 watts from the wall at max power draw like if you were actually pulling 650 watts it's actually pulling more than that because it has to pull more after the efficiency loss to give you the delivered rating now that rating is going to depend on the 80 plus rating right there so we'll put on screen here it's just an overview shot to show you kind of the different efficiencies but what you'll notice is it's a very small amount once you get above gold it's kind of a diminishing return but you'll get a percent or two better each time and being right around 94.95 and i think closer to 96 more efficient now uh is making things obviously look way better than they did back when 80 plus was the good stuff but the only way you can get those ratings and the efficiency higher is just having a power supply that's better at doing its job and by doing that you're talking about a much better design and component inside so now that we've sort of talked about the power delivery and how that sort of works let's talk about some nice to haves so what i've got right here are four different power supplies that couldn't be any more different from each other we've got the very basic cooler master master watt light 500 master maker 580 plus master version here i just still think cooler master has the stupidest names in the market so i'm going to point that out it's a 500 watt max rated power supply with a uh just super basic design here it's 80 plus that means it's going to give you at least 80 efficiency it's actually higher than 80 when you say 80 plus again if you refer to that chart i mentioned um a lot of power supplies out there that are super cheap and come with cases or a silver box often don't even have a rating so those are the ones that you should use as nothing more than maybe a test power supply to make your fans and stuff work i would never actually hook them up to your components but this is a no frills designed to get you something that works from a brand that has a reputation to get your system up and running you can see right here it's got some ugly sleeving that's see-through it's just a mesh sleeving it's got what's referred to as ketchup and mustard cables you've got red white or red yellow orange and black wires on here and those are actually wires that are based exactly on their power rating so yellow is 12 volt yeah i know that seems confusing right most of us that work in automotive are used to red being 12 volt no yellow is 12 volt red is 5 volt orange is 3 volt black is ground so yeah it's just basic it's non-modular which means the cables do not detach anything you don't need you got to coil up and stick somewhere else but if you want to step it up from there this is the cooler master v650 now this is a gold rated power supply so that means it's got a higher efficiency rating than anything that's 80 plus 80 plus bronze or 80 plus silver it's also a semi modular power supply so what that means we've got our 12 our 24 pin still attached we've got our 8 pin eps still attached and one pigtail wire for pci express so that'd be good for a lower wattage demand gpu since these are necessary cables to run any system then those are not modules they're like why make it modular if you know you aren't going to be unplugging those anyway they still have terrible sleeving on them you can still see through them semi you can still see the ketchup of mustard underneath but the semi-modular aspect here is for things like the sata power the molex power and not on this particular power supply but some power supplies will have additional pci express cables available to them so you can unplug the satas and molex that you don't need to make a tidier setup in your system now moving on over here this is the phantek revolt pro and this is a thousand watt power supply this is also an 80 plus gold so when it comes to its efficiency gold you're going to find is kind of the the baseline the main standard you can find gold to be pretty affordable these days that means you know it's made with much better components uh than in the past in fact finding silver and bronze these days is actually harder in fact finding silver is probably the hardest most people tend to go right from gold or sorry they tend to go right from bronze to gold when it comes to their ratings because silver is so close to gold a lot of times they'll just step up the component level to get it up to gold and it doesn't really cost the manufacturer any more money but the reason why i'm holding this one here is this is what a full modular power supply looks like you can see the 24 pin the 8 pin cpu powers which has more than one so something else this is just one of the big boys on the market this is about the highest wattage you can go in the united states based on our 15 amp circuits which are really common and our 110 to 120 volt delivery system 1 600 watts it's about the most that you can get in fact when you see us doing our sli 3090 ln2 overclocks i've got to run two of these bad boys to power our graphics cards because of the amount of power that a single plug can pull the fact is the amount of amps that i can pull through our circuits as well means that i've got to run two of these off two separate breakers just to make sure i have enough power to power those cards but i'm showing you this guy because one thing i want to point out is the higher the wattage you go the longer the power supply tends to be that's just because again the amount of components that are in here the size of the fan for cooling the heat sink that's built into it they tend to be much longer and much heavier power supplies and once again fully modular in fact it even has a proprietary type of plug in here it's not the standard power cable like you would see in any of these power supplies it has a very specific keyed one that way you don't run too low of a gauge because if you were to pull a full 1600 watts out of this thing with a power cord that's a low gauge you're going to melt the cord potentially have a fire hazard but as you can see the size does matter now when it comes to mounting all of the mounts on the face of the power supply where they go into the base of your system with the exception of an sfx power supply which is a small form factor one are going to be the same and they can mount in either direction now let's talk about a couple of things here when it comes to sizing your power supply because these are other questions that i get one of the things that i am most known for in my channel is going with a much bigger power supply than i need one of the most common misconceptions from any newbie that really tries to get involved in the conversations regarding power supply is their misunderstanding of what the wattage classifications mean i've had people say why would you use a 1600 watt power supply in your system you're pushing way too much power and you're going to break something that's not the way electricity works remember electricity is a draw not a push yes you can push power with a power supply designed to do that these power supplies are designed to provide what is being pulled from the components attached to it so if i have a system that is using let's say a ryzen 3700x and i've got a 3080 attached to it and all the peripherals and stuff if this 650 watt power supply is enabler is able to provide let's say the theoretical 550 watts the system needs and i put a watt stopper on this or a watt meter and it says it's pulling 550 watts if i take that same component or that same tower and hook it up to the 1600 watt power supply guess what you're gonna see the same wattage the reason for that is the max rating has nothing to do with the actual power that your components are pulling so that brings me to the discussion about sizing your power supply i started this segment by saying i like to run power supplies that are way bigger than i actually need the reason for that is understanding the efficiency of the power supplies that i talked about earlier in this video it is actually a bell curve on the way the efficiency curve works so the closer you get to the max delivery of the power supply the hotter the power supply gets and the more inefficient it becomes so you'll have some power supplies that are more efficient than others at 100 utilization versus others at 50 or 60 percent so i always err on the side of just like building a fuel system for a race car there's no such thing as having a too much fuel delivery to the injectors anyway if you have the injectors pushing too much fuel then you just run rich and that's a whole different discussion but running lean is a bad thing and that's the same thing with your power supply if it's too small your system runs lean you start getting random blue screens and or just straight up shutdowns because of what's called over current protection built into pretty much every modern power supply these days in these power supplies pretty much from all reputable brands you're going to have an internal circuit breaker that when it notices that too much power is being drawn through it rather than have a component overheat or catch fire it will flip that breaker that will reset when you unplug it and plug it back in or flip the switch on the back and flip it back on pretty much all power supplies even the cheapest ones on the market have this toggle switch because that's a lot easier than just having to unplug it and plug it back in so when it comes to sizing your power supply let's say your system or your graphics card is recommending a 650 or 750 watt power supply does that mean your graphics card actually needs 750 watts no it means the graphics card manufacturers are accounting for the hypothetical potential equipment that you're hooking up to it are you running a threadripper 32 core system or are you running an 8700k six core system see they don't know that so they have to account for what you could potentially be hooking it up to and make sure that they have enough overhead in their recommendations to make sure that the power supply that you're using that they recommend is enough to run most systems out there not up to you on whether or not you uh are going to be putting too much if you're gonna put 50 fans in there and a bunch of water pumps and 62 000 leds and fan controllers and lights and monitors and all like stuff hooked up to the usbs everywhere then yes you're going to need a little bit bigger power supply if you're gonna be running a high-end graphics card i usually recommend uh a thousand watt power supply for anyone running any sort of high-end components whether it be high-end multi-core resin cpus uh water cooling something that's like an 80 series gpu or higher or something like a 6800 xt or higher because then you maintain plenty of power for your system and you stay within that peak range of the curve that way you also have the most efficient uh power delivery possible now that also gives you a little bit of future proofing if you build your system and you buy your power supply expected exactly what you have now and you want to upgrade in the future to a higher end graphics card or a higher end cpu or more core count or whatever it may be and you find that your system or your power supply is barely able to deliver what you need now then you're gonna be buying a new power supply in the future the nice thing about power supplies is they're one of the most reusable components in your system as you upgrade as you go because electricity doesn't change the plugs haven't changed in decades they're the same they've always been sata is probably the newest plug that we've seen introduced to systems in the last 20 years so your power supply is extremely reusable and if you size it up now and get a better power supply now it can move with you for several generations of upgrades let's use the hypothetical somebody running a gtx 1060 uh five years ago that's a very low watt part it does not use very many watts it's under 200 watts of power draw however if you were running a 2080 ti or something like that that was still a 250 watt tdp power or graphics card but if you moved up to a 3080 it was 320 watts and if you want to move up to a 390 it was 350 watts some of the highest power draw we've seen from nvidia graphics card going all the way back to like the 400 series or even the 200 series prior to that so that means that a power supply upgrade would have been in your future had you had a graphics card uh pulling low wattage and you went with a low watt power supply to meet the demands of your system at that time i hope this video hasn't been too confusing i tried to keep it as simple as i could um it's it's really basic it's really nothing too extravagant here my recommendations if you're just like look jay i just want you to tell me what to get fine i can tell you right now an 80 plus gold 850 watt power supply uh from any reputable brand whether the evga cooler master c sonic corsair um whoever else is out there i mean phanteks right nzxt a lot of these brands are using the same oems whether it be seasonic or superflower and so what you're going to find is the internals and stuff are almost identical in all of these what's different is some of the plugs that you might find oh that's also a very important thing if you're dealing with a modular power supply although one plug from one power supply might fit into another don't feel tempted to use that cable in another power supply the pin out may be different i can't tell you how many people have told me they've blown something up because they took a cable from one power supply into and plugged it into another in fact it's happened here in the past once where um nick actually blew up an ssd of mine because he used the plug from a wrong power supply and bye-bye ssd and that was a very expensive lesson but an 850 watt gold rated power supply would be enough to pretty much power any single graphics card high core count cpu these days and last you for several years into the future so i hope this video has helped you guys get some understanding on power supplies um a lot of people really like to over complicate it it's really not that complicated so if you guys have any topics you think you'd like us to talk about in the future we go back to sort of like the beginning or the basics for some of the new people now that are brand new to the pc world 2020 has probably created more new pc users than we've ever seen in the history of pc and so i know it's confusing out there when you're just like there's so much information it's kind of like when you join an mmo and start with a boosted character at end game you have no idea what the hell is going on so that's what these videos are designed to do is to give you guys some help you have a topic you'd like us to cover sound off in the comments below subscribe if you're new around here and share this video with someone that maybe you've seen sharing some misinformation about power supplies so that maybe you can get them on the right side of the conversation spreading proper information rather than misinformation thanks for watching guys and as always

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 570,490

Rating: 4.9507394 out of 5

Keywords: power supply, how to choose, psu, how to choose a psu, how to choose a power supply, what is 80plus, is 80plus needed, is 80plus worth it, 80plus bronze, 80plus silver, 80plus gold, 80plus platinum, 80plus titanium, power supply unit, best power supply, 12v rail, computer parts, pc parts, are power supplies important, Jayztwocents, tech talk, pc building simulator, jay z two cents, budget build, how to choose the right psu, powersupply, what is the right power supply

Id: bUh2EZzJZRU

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JonnySuisse]

It’s curious because I have the same opinions as Jay for many years now and each time that I post these same recommendations on Reddit, I get downvoted. Maybe noobs now can pay more attention since there is a video explaining these basics regarding psu. Thank you Jay.