Exploding Power Supplies: Gigabyte & Newegg Dumping Unsellable Product

[Music] this is called a catastrophic failure so is this and this and all of these power supplies are the gigabyte gp p750 gm or closely related gpp 850 gm one of these catastrophically failed while under only 60 percent load and out of the 10 or so units that we bought from newegg are acquired from viewers we had several other catastrophic failures during the course of testing we blew three fuses from our power supply load tester and we toasted a gigabyte rtx 3080 that was attached to one of the power supplies a shocking 50 of these failed in an explosive capacity while we were testing them that's some pretty good odds for fireworks so today we're going to be diagnosing this issue the best that we're able to hear and looking at some of the trigger points for failure we'll also be talking about what you should do if you had one of these dumped on you during newegg's shuffle while it was trying to offload its unsellable explosive e-waste alongside the highly desirable video cards we're 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other item today send help the power supplies we're looking at today were getting purged through new x shuffle where it tries to dump unsellable e-waste bin product alongside highly desirable things but still charge you for both of them so that it can get rid of some of its inventory and clear up shelf space so we're gonna be looking at these the power supplies for the 750 watt model we're about 130 dollars we bought several of them we requested several from viewers and so we've got a pretty good sample size and we suspect that at some point these power supplies may end up getting uh dropped for a loss as well because the price has been slowly descending as to have the aggregate review scores been descending on newegg's own website and amazon's as well actually so gigabyte power supplies online right now these specific models at least aren't faring too well in user reviews they didn't fare well in eris's testing previously power supply reviewer we'll get into his content soon enough and so we acquired 10 of them and a big thanks to our viewers as well who helped us get some of these many months ago we've been doing everything from endurance tests which took a long time to full-on power supply testing so we're going to try and diagnose it today first of all these are not the same as the similarly named gigabyte aor's gp ap 750 gm and gp ap 850 gm those are fine at least as far as we're aware and we're instead talking only about the 715 850 units that we mentioned and have shown on the table here because gigabyte makes multiple models gigabyte via amazon does what it can to cover up this mess by lumping together all of its products but even manipulating the average listing score can't save these power supplies from being prone to combustion these bad reviews from users correspond with our findings as well in our testing we're going to give you the core details right up front we have a lot to talk about today but we do want to get the bulk of this out there immediately so in our testing 50 of units failed catastrophically during or after overpower protection testing some failed with 60 load just after the first overpower protection testing pass we were able to identify the often mosfets that exploded specifically and we'll talk about all that and also this will serve as a bit of an educational piece for power supply testing for you as well if you're curious about it in a survey that we conducted of buyers of these power supplies where the data was collected via voluntary online submission from our youtube community page 16 of users reported that their power supplies failed in such a way that they were no longer usable and we did filter out data that looked bad we required uh serial numbers things of that nature to isolate this and then we aggregated the data from the reviews on newegg.com separately where we saw 54 of the customer reviews and there are a lot of them were of power supplies that failed the data suggests that this is probably a bad product bad product by the way is a fair thing to say we've sometimes seen this platitude not really show their origin this platitude that gets posted every now and then in comments about bad products don't exist only bad prices exist no no no bad products exist we have tested many of them sometimes they try to kill us even despite that though companies are absolutely allowed to make mistakes these are complicated things to make look at it and uh although it is well documented at this point and failures of this magnitude are very preventable we could understand if gigabytes shipped some exploding units realized it was a problem and then recalled it and fixed it what we won't stand for though is when the bad product is getting pushed on people knowingly who are in a vulnerable position these of course are the people who especially a few months ago when all this started were desperate for a video card especially at msrp finally had a chance to buy one and then newegg said you got to take this and those people if they were so fortunate uh would be in the best position if they didn't need the power supply because they had one they put it on a shelf and were uncertain of what to do with it but for the people who ended up using them uh if it worked out for you excellent we don't have data to suggest that it will continue to do so but maybe it will and if it didn't work out for you that sucks because you didn't have a lot of recourse for a long time with these first off the biggest problem with all this was that newegg wouldn't take returns of a dead psu without also requiring a return of the video card when the rtx 30 series was being released nueck bundled these power supplies with rtx 30 series cards and it seemed like a good deal at first glance however at that point the first glance was also the only glance because the video card was gone if you took more than just one glance we're not sure the exact definition of a glance and the duration of it but you get the idea so within 45 nanoseconds gps are gone on newegg especially back when they first came out and that meant you bought a power supply whether you needed it or not in a lot of cases now of course in the worst of this market anyone who won the lottery ticket to get an msrp video card probably was gonna stick with the payout of that lottery ticket even after the attachment item the power supply maybe failed or became undesirable if you had one of these things fail and you had to do some sort of warranty process or return process there's a chance your video card goes away with it that was what newegg was requiring for some time from what we understand and uh also if you wanted to return it you had to again at least for a long while it was a big controversy online too send everything back with it so enough for backstory let's do the teardown on the power supplies we'll get patrick stone to do that he did all the testing for us as well and all testing was performed prior to disassembly as a reminder do not disassemble power supplies at least if you don't know what you're doing it can be dangerous or potentially deadly if done improperly but we've taken all necessary precautions for this so we attempted to do a root cause analysis on these psus by opening them up and looking at the individual components and what we found was that some of the parts inside the psus weren't all from the same vendors and this differed based on the model and in some cases maybe just random chance we're not really sure but when we looked in there we we did find different parts now this makes sense if you've got like an 850 watt unit and a 750 watt unit and they have different parts because there's different outputs so you're going to have to have different parts but even still maybe they should be from the same vendor the same source what's strange though is when you've got an 850 watt unit over here and an 850 watt unit over here from the exact same family supposed to be the same and there are different parts so it makes us wonder if maybe there was some kind of silent fix during the manufacturing cycle of these power supplies or maybe there's a component shortage we don't really know so what we did do is we went and looked at the individual components to try and see what the differences were and in the 750 watt unit we have a brand named jilin sino and they made the mosfets on the apfc and the primary switching but then the mosfets in the 850 watt unit were a little bit different if we come over here and look at this 850 watt unit we do have one of them missing but these guys right here were from a brand called nce power then if you go and look at the dc 12 volt output you look at the filtering caps over there on the 750 watt unit and this is true for most of the 750 watt units we looked at the conductive polymer caps they have this orange here and this little cs marker beside them indicates that they're from a company called chinsan but then if we move over to the 850-watt unit and this is representative of most the 50-watt units that we tested no longer do we see orange we now see blue and this belongs to a company called lilong now this is where it gets a little bit different if we look at this other 850 watt unit this guy right here it should be blue and it should be long but it's not it's red and it's typo so the conductive polymer caps were different between the 750 and the 850 and different between different models of the 850. it didn't stop there though if we keep going if we look at the 750s aluminum electrolytic caps near this dc 12 volt output filtering area you've got these green and gold ones these green and gold ones were from a company we hadn't even heard of before chn cap and then if you look at the configuration it's pretty similar between the 750 and the 850 but in this 850 we have black and gray ones and these black and gray or black and silver ones are from a company we just mentioned a minute ago typo and once again if we look at another 850 side by side no longer do we have black and gray but black and bronze or black and gold whatever you want to call it and these are from a company we heard of also lilong so it's just kind of strange that we've got two products from the exact same family with different components in them uh we would really like to see more consistency in the components so take a look at this for instance the bolt cap this is a pretty typical bolt cap napoleon chemicon uh 600 a microfarad and if we look at the 850 watt units hey look at this all looks the same same vendor and kimicorn napoleon chemicon only difference between the 750 and 850 is the size of the cap 680 microfarad versus 820 microfarad so we'd like to see that kind of consistency across the whole family but we don't and that makes us wonder what were what was gigabyte doing were they like bargain sourcing the components um if that's the case that's not exactly what you want out of a 100 to 150 price range psu a brief interruption from stone's work to talk about some assumptions so we think gigabyte probably knew shortly after these units started shipping the market that there were some serious problems and what's known uh classically in the industry in specific terminology as an oops moment we think that the return rate was probably high and that gigabyte probably already made a lot of these this makes the oops moment a higher severity oops known as an oopsy dupsy which is what gigabyte was saying when it realized that there was a problem at this point gigabyte had already sold them to retailers like newegg so they just let the distribution continue through those channels we don't know if this is still happening or if the power supplies are still being produced gigabyte may have killed them in the manufacturing process however at the time of the 30 series launch and for at least several months after newegg has had a lot of stock of them then what made the situation worse for customers was that as the number of returns and bad reviews continued to escalate new egg stopped allowing returns of the power supplies by themselves this indicated that they knew they were suspect and did not want them back that's your garbage now we sold it to you in the end what appears to have happened may not be precisely illegal but it is generally regarded as a bad move the negative user reviews and suspicion got some test data to back it all up back in november power supply review veteran eris published a video review of his 750 watt unit failing with fireworks on his youtube channel during normal testing he attempted to report the failures to gigabyte but they basically said that there weren't any problems as far as they could see since then we've had viewers reach out with their own gigabyte power supply failures and ask us to investigate these problems that obviously exist so we decided to connect with aeris to compare notes in aries's review he recommended that gigabyte quote lower the opp and the 12 volt ocp trip point opp we've already defined and ocp is just over current protection both of these are protections that help prevent the power supply from melting components they're two out of six common protections that exist on high quality power supplies and we'll talk about just how high the trip points were on the gigabyte power supplies and what we did to validate eris's testing later in the video our initial research for this was to figure out if it was just a hate parade on newegg and gigabyte or if the product was actually bad we really weren't sure when we were getting into this we knew that areas had one unit explode but we didn't know if that was uh resolved in the time since he had reviewed it if it was a one-off or whatever and certainly the evidence was piling for a hate parade on newegg because of the bundling with the gpu situation so we started looking into it and we did a complete analysis of the new egg reviews and conducted a survey once again of our youtube community users from newegg reviews we learned that it wasn't just the 750 watt model that was failing the gp 850 gm had similar reviews though notably fewer of them doa was the most frequently reported issue at 38.2 percent for the 750 and 38.9 for the 850. other commonly occurring user reported failure modes were over time at 8 at worst under load at about two to three percent and random shutdowns at about two percent to three percent there was also destruction of other components as one of the failure modes at four percent or three percent depending on the power supply overall the gpp 750 gm reviews posted 54.3 doa or rendered unusable and the 850 was similar at 50 these numbers from the reviews are staggering from 209 total reviews at the time we originally did this data collection months ago 112 of them described their psus as being unusable with 80 of the 112 being doa that's too much doa even in spite of that our test data more closely resembled the newegg reports than our user survey half of our units failed to be clear most of the failures are from overpower protection testing and most users will not put their power supply through that type of load however it should survive it that's what they're designed to do and that's why it's called a protection not a self-destruction device and even still we obviously don't have enough sample size to test all the failure types and gigabyte has potential to have many in here uh users in the review section of these products we don't suspect would be triggering opp when they're failing to the extent that we were doing and so we think most likely there's uh what would be known as a problem in the power supplies beyond just the overpower protection circuit when we tested we used four 750s and four 850s initially three of the four 750s failed and one of the 850s failed in that initial round of the four failures two of the 750s and one of the 850s failed before overpower protection that's the bad part the other 750 watt unit failed a few minutes after opp testing protocols were followed in such a way that it modeled eris's testing as closely as possible because initially we were just trying to do good science and cross-validate during our testing our load testers suffered three blown fuses and we lost the rtx 3080 however the failure of that 3080 was not specifically traced back to the power supply we were unable to root cause it at least as of now there's a possibility that the graphics card died on its own it's a gigabyte graphics card so unfortunately for gigabyte if the video card's death was unrelated to gigabytes power supplies it is still related to gigabyte we're not sure what killed it it may have had its own design fault but that's still a gigabyte problem anyway it was literally out of the box brand new unboxed for the test it worked with no problems for a few days and then it died possibly related eight of the 209 newegg reviews also reported destroyed components but most were linked to sata power connections for each of the devices that we tested we ran the devices for two minutes at 20 load 60 load and 100 load then we went to 10 second intervals at 110 120 percent 130 percent and 140 or until overpower protection triggered once every power protection triggered we let the psu reset itself and then turned it back on at the point just before it triggered so if it failed at 140 percent we'd jump back to 130 percent to start searching for the exact overpower protection trigger point from there we'd use these little guys right here and we would nudge these things up just a little bit at a time each of these current levels on each of the rails to find exactly where the overpower protection trigger point was at that point the power supply would trigger and trip again we'd let it reset and then we gave it about five minutes just like what eris was doing in his testing and then we'd bring it back online at 60 load so that we could see if it was still working properly to validate the methodology we ran the test on a known good psu before moving on to the gigabyte units the known good psu went through the testing protocol without problems during all the tests our sun moon sm 8800 provided precise and accurate input control by allowing easily repeatable adjustment of the amperage down to the nearest hundredth of an ampere when reading the output the sm800 provided voltage reporting accuracy to the nearest hundredth of a volt the sm-220 the top unit provided accurate power measurements down to the 100th of a watt and amperage measurements to the nearest thousandth of an amp both load testing devices allowed us to control the experiment in a way that would have been nearly impossible to do in a pc using synthetically generated loads the ease of monitoring and adjustment ensured that our testing and results were reliable and consistent we tested our first two purchased 850s in february actually in an effort to replicate eris's exploded mosfets but both of those units performed as they should have triggering opp and resetting with no issues we then tested a viewer provided 750 in march and a viewer provided 850 in early may that both passed all tests without issues by the time we got to our fifth unit we were beginning to think that the whole situation was maybe blown out of proportion by the internet and maybe it was just hate about being forced to buy a video card with a power supply that was undesirable that's when things changed for the worse or or the better depending on if your gigabyte the fifth test was on another viewer unit and this time it was an 850 watt model the unit survived the initial ramp and triggered opp at 140 load when we brought it back to 130 percent and began incrementing to find the exact opp trigger point that's when one of the apfc mosfets exploded the exploded fet was an nce power nce65t180f oddly the failure was in a different brand of component a different model of power supply and a different location within the power supply than in eris's testing this complicated things the next power supply we tested replicated eris's failure exactly the components inside were the same as what areas had found in his failed unit and the two components that failed were in the exact same location and the way they exploded was eerily similar to what aeris had shown back in november or so the most interesting thing about the failure was that it happened after the unit successfully shut down on opp test in at 140 percent and its exact trigger point of 133 in other words it survived opp testing the way it was supposed to it passed it was almost through uh and then it failed at 60 so we waited five minutes after the 140 the 133 testing we turned it on we put a 60 load on the power supply and that's when the catastrophic failure occurred it blew up it would have made sense if the failure occurred under a heavier load but 60 is not a heavy load it's a very normal workload for most computers to be under at least in our space and to explode at 60 it's just unacceptable for any power supply so 60 load uh is is easy to achieve on a 750 watt power supply with a high end gpu a high in cpu playing a game at that point we decided to go all in and acquire four more 750 watt units from newegg the next unit we tested failed while attempting to locate the exact opv trigger point this time the right apfc fat failed with a mild spark and then a small puff of smoke this one shared the same failure location as our first failed 850 watt unit so now we'd had two different mosfet brands fail in the same location of the design on two different models after sharing these findings with aeris and some other professionals in the psu space we began to lean more towards manufacturing or design as the likely cause of failure since we thought we might be onto something we did what we do and went a little bit crazier with it we rigged up a bunch of thermal couples to unit number nine and worked on some more testing for this one interestingly it popped the same fat as the previous one did and the two power supplies had sequential serial numbers two three nine six and two three nine seven the mosfets are rated for operation up to 150 degrees celsius and the point of failure we were able to reach with a thermocouple probe so it's not an exact measurement of the failure point but it was 195 degrees celsius over temperature protection regardless of the delta internal versus external this which is not by the way 45 degrees that's insane the otp should have kicked in and shut the unit down we at this point had seen enough to validate eris's testing and needed to put a cap on our own time investment because it had been and still is dragging on for months at this point we would not be comfortable using these at this point we decided to go all in on this and do one final run and that was for endurance testing we needed to build a system that we were okay with losing any of the parts in it to the power supply in the event the power supply took something out with it if it died so naturally we built this computer this computer is filled almost entirely with gigabyte components so we were more willing to part with them if they went up in flames the rtx 3080 did we later replaced it with a 6900 xt otherwise we had 16 gigabytes of gigabyte ddr4 4800 megahertz memory running at 3600 z590 master motherboard lf2 360 which actually don't want to lose that one and of course here 5000 the airflow we set up to run loops of playing games and running synthetic benchmarks switching between them with a 60 power load and plan to let it run for about one month as that was the most common overtime failure interval from newegg data that endeavor by the way lasted 72 hours before we walked in one day and the screen was black and the room smelled like the magic smoke had come out of something and that was again the gpu take a moment to remember it being uncertain what actually killed the gpu we continued on with the 6900xt and the system ended up after crashing several times due to amd driver issues that are unrelated ended up surviving we only endurance tested one unit and we can't account for all the types of workloads that are out there so unfortunately this is not conclusive but we thought it'd be worth trying it just to see we can't be 100 certain what the failure is but we have some pretty good ideas at this point so our belief is that a protection circuit needs improvement it could be ocp it could be otp it could be opp but without a lot more testing and by a lot we mean basically being in the lab that gigabytes should have access to with hundreds of these that we we can't draw a conclusion so we strongly believe that uh these failures could be prevented with better design and probably better component selection we also agree with eris's suggestions in his written review that quote over 130 percent opp and ocp triggering points are not good they should be triggering sooner than this it's not necessarily a good thing that the power supply can sort of run at 130 percent if a user tries to push it to run at that level it should be shutting down soon when we reached out to gigabyte to ask a few questions about these two power supply models they eventually responded they stood by the decisions to use the mosfets that failed in opp test and it's interesting that for opp gigabyte informed us that the 750 watt unit was designed for an opp range of 825 watts to 925 watts they said the 850 watt unit was designed for 950 to 1050. the reason this is interesting is because that's not where they actually triggered all of our units exceeded those ranges for opp so this breach is the intended design already failure detection isn't solely on the opp circuit another protection that could have been prevented again as otp in gigabytes response the company wrote that otp in these units is designed to trigger over 55 degrees celsius ambient at full load as long as the cooling fan here is working then the ambient temperature of the power supply should never reach that point it would have been more beneficial to monitor the heat sinks of the mosfets but that starts getting into cost and design decisions so the circuitry here needs revisions and some of the components are questionable too like some of these capacitors uh we are suspicious of the gp p850 gm failure rates are not good but the 750 is somehow tragically worse it's actually the worst we've ever seen in any electronics product we've worked on uh in the last 14 or 15 or so years so the quality of the mosfets and capacitors is questionable the protection circuitry needs improvements that leads us to the obvious conclusion of don't willingly buy this and probably don't accept it if noah is going to try and force it on you either because that's stupid and newegg needs to learn if you already have one of these running just like we did in our endurance testing rig that was running for a month it's possible there will never be a problem not all of them are bad again ours ran nearly endlessly switching between types of load and idle periods and everything like a user scenario for a month no issues except for the dead rtx 3080 but um we still don't know if that was a different gigabyte issue if you are thinking about buying this power supply don't simple enough if you have it in your system and it's running it seems like it's been running fine then we're not going to tell you to rip it out we have data that suggests it may be fine and it might be fine forever we don't know that we couldn't run it that long it's a long time but uh i'll break rank here and tell you what i personally would think and you can decide what you want to do personally i i would not be comfortable leaving this running in my computer i would remove it and i would probably very aggressively pursue a refund with newegg that's what i would do but i'm also acutely aware that we have some data that suggests it may be fine forever just like i'd be aware of some other publication ran this and i had it in my system i would still take it out that's just my opinion you can do whatever you want lastly and actually most importantly we don't think e-waste that's stuck on shelves should be forcibly pushed on users who are desperate to purchase a device when it is in short supply this was clearly a a poor quality product newegg almost certainly knew about this in advance that's why it was part of the shuffle and this should have been handled between newegg and gigabyte it's actually worse if they work together and still pushed on the users that's a lot more terrifying but anyway customers shouldn't have to bear the burden of a known bad product and finding a local e-waste recycler near them to get rid of it so that's it for this one simple enough don't buy it and thanks for watching as always took us a long time to do this if you want to support this type of work go to store.gamerzexus.net or patreon.comgamersnexus to help us out with this so thank you for the opportunity uh by watching the video and subscribe for more we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 986,358

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, gigabyte gp-p750gm, gigabyte gp-p850gm, gigabyte power supply explode, gigabyte gp-p750gm review, gigabyte psu benchmark, gigabyte psu test, gigabyte power supply return, newegg gigabyte shuffle, worst power supplies, best pc power supplies

Id: aACtT_rzToI

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TicklishRocket]

That sucks, and tells you that Gigabyte is not putting these through QC like they should. Feel sorry for anyone who lost one of their components along with the PSU.

[u/Isaacvithurston]

Newegg has been shit for so long. They're going to be the much larger american NCIX lol

[u/[deleted]]

If it's Gamer Nexus you know it's gonna be good.

[u/RedditPremiumAccount]

holy moly at 3:40. And lol at the Oopsie Doopsie no take backsy.

[u/SnickIefritzz]

I had to buy one of these in a combo package for a 3070, ended up selling it third party. Hope dudes okay.

[u/IbRx65]

So I built a new pc this weekend and this is the PSU I got in my bundle. Everything is working fine for now. Any suggestions on what I should do?

[u/Vitosi4ek]

I bought a super cheap Aerocool 650W unit for like $50 in 2017 when building my first rig and it's rocking to this day (albeit downgraded to a country home PC with much less powerful hardware). Because of this I was convinced that genuine fire-hazard PSUs, like the Diabloteks of old, don't exist anymore.

Apparently I was wrong. And it's not some no name Chinese brand, either - it costs $130, for fuck's sake.

[u/Reacher-Said-N0thing]

If this happened with any other home product like a TV or a dishwasher or a washing machine, there would be class action lawsuits, recalls, they'd be sending technicians to your house to fix it...

But with PC components its like "oh your PSU caught fire? Yeah that one's shit, buy a different one."

[u/mikhalych]

Rule zero of building a PC : never cheap out on the PSU. It is the one component that, when it fails, is likely to take out everything else. Get shitty ram, get shitty disks, but never get a shitty PSU.