- In this box is a PCI
express power filter card. It claims to smooth out the
dirty power from bad components and improve the audio signals
coming out of your PC. And what we're going to
do is we're gonna feed it a worst case scenario with a super cheap
1,000 watt power supply, along with a very coil whiny graphics card to see if it actually makes
any appreciable difference to sound quality. My expectations, well,
I wasn't born yesterday, so pretty low. Speaking of born yesterday, though, I wrote a children's board book and we just got our first
set of mostly final samples. So if you or anyone, you
know, works for a bookseller and wants to have the ABC's
of gaming on your shelves this holiday season
for those little gamers who are still too young for a next gen console for Christmas, contact us at Books@LTTstore.com and we'll get the info you need
to place your initial order. (electronic music) Before we can get into this
card and what we expect, we have to talk about power
and how it's converted from the main's AC power out of your wall to the DC power that
your hardware works with. Most PCs today use what's
called a switch mode or switching power supply. This is mostly because, compared
to a linear power supply, they are smaller, lighter,
and more efficient. A switching power supply can
be as much as 80% smaller and can have efficiencies as high as 96% compared to the peak of around 60% for a linear power supply. But that doesn't mean that
switching power supplies, like this one, don't have any downsides. And one of them is that they
create more electrical noise. If you've ever turned on a speaker and heard a (electrical humming) when no audio is being played, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Quote unquote, dirty power
can rear its ugly head from the external supply, things like voltage spikes
or lower unbalanced AC power, like we have here in our building, or even internally within the system after the conversion to DC, from components like graphics
cards or other chips. Now aficionados of high end audio have tried a huge variety of ways to mitigate this unwanted electrical noise with varying levels of success. One of the most common
methods of noise suppression is power conditioning, where essentially you use a device that takes the less than
desirable power that it's given, then acts as a buffer, outputting a nice clean AC power signal to sensitive audio hardware
farther down the line. If you watched our overview
of the Abyss Diana headphones, you may remember this
monster of an amp tower. This is the sort of thing that has had plenty of forethought
given to power delivery. For example, where is it? Where does it, there it is, ah! - [Colin] Rip. - Actually, it fell pretty
flat, it's probably fine. For example. (laughs) For example, look at this plug here with its bi-directional
noise containment technology. Thing is, most people
don't have the $15,000 to buy an amp stack to
power their speakers. What if they just want to use a PC? Well, that's where this, at
least in theory, comes in. meet the Elfidelity AXF-107 Magician, a PCI express power purifying filter fresh out of Shenzhen, China. It's sports seven different capacitors, seven different capacitors. It's sports seven different capacitors. And wouldn't you know it, they even threw in a little
bit of RGB for good measure. Although, I'm only gonna give
them half points for that because to change the colors,
you actually have to flip these little dip switches here with a pin. Now it claims to, and I quote here, prevent video card coil wine
and improve overclocking as well as reduced noise floor for an ultimate PC audio build spec. That is quite the claim. Wow. You know, like if one $40 card can create ultimate PC audio
spec, I will be shocked. just as shocked as it was to hear that we've got a new shirt, check it out. It's CPU pins. But if
you look really close, actually, if you look from far away, it's got an LTT logo in it. Up your geek street credit
on LTTstore.com today. Now to create the perfect
storm of bad audio, we grabbed Anthony's GPU test bench and replaced the perfectly
good Silverstone power supply with the sketchiest one we
had in the entire warehouse, this $25 1,000 watt China special. You're actually going to
see this again, by the way, assuming it survives the day, in our upcoming Lennon PC build. Hit that subscribe button
so you don't miss out. While we were at it. We tossed in this Sapphire nitro plus Radeon
RX 590 special edition for maximum coil whininess. Even when this puppy
is not doing anything. Hear that crackling, that ticking. Can you hear it? - A little bit.
- Yeah. That's not even doing anything, David. All right, let's start with a baseline without our power filtering card in here. Preloaded on this machine. I've got a handful of
lossless audio tracks, ready to go and Grado's
420 edition headphones as our reference cans to start with. ♪ Rise up from the ashes
just like a phoenix ♪ I really need to move to
flac for all my stuff. Now, what I'd really love to have is something with sort of
quiet parts of the track, so let me poke around a little bit here. 'Cause that's where you're
going to be able to hear that hiss or that higher noise floor. While I'm listening, I'm gonna
go ahead and run SPECviewperf which is like a professional
applications benchmark that loads up both our CPU and GPU to see if I hear any of that, delightful buzzing through
my headphones here. Can you hear that wine now that
we've actually loaded it up? - [Colin] Yeah. - I just, I can't make
out any problem here. To be clear, these are not the most difficult headphones
in the world to drive so it's not a huge surprise to me that the onboard audio on this motherboard is able to drive them just fine. And I'm not saying that if you didn't have very high end audiophile headphones you might not need a
better audio solution. It's just that that's not
what we're testing for today. Today we just want to know
if this makes a difference in a setup that someone
might normally actually use. So I dunno, maybe I'm gonna be blown away. Let's throw the power filter card in and see how we do here. Something to note, guys, that we didn't actually mention before is this can be installed either in a PCIE 1x slot or a 16x slot, so you can insert your
placebo however you like, you just flip the bracket around and install it the other way. Where's my RGB at? Oh, it's set to white. Yeah, that's more work than
I think it's worth to change. I actually want to start
with the simplest thing. Just the test tone. (digital fanfare) And it's fine. Fire up SPECviewperf I guess. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one thing that we can determine, like if it helps with the
coil wine out of the GPU. It's horrible. Let's listen to those
same tracks again now. ♪ Stand up together, stand up together ♪ - Still a good song. Yup. Wait, Rick Astley made it onto this greatest hits of the 80s collection, but not with "Never Gonna Give You Up"? What even is that. I dunno, so Colin prepared this video and he wrote it as though
there was no difference. And I wanted to try real
hard to find a difference that he didn't detect but
unfortunately I couldn't. Not even in the coil wine of the system. So, the question then is, what made Elfidelity think
that this was going to work? Is there any scientific basis whatsoever for why putting a PCI express card into an entirely different slot would have any impact
on the DC power quality of a graphics card that's
over here in another slot or a sound card that's built
right into the motherboard? You can actually see it
down at the bottom there. Well actually, people have
been putting capacitors and inductors and power lines
to smooth out noisy signals for a long time now. LC filters are a perfect
example of this principle that are commonly used in
drones to improve video quality, which can be degraded
by the electrical noise caused by the motors and the ESCs, particularly when they're
rapidly changing speed. So the principle is actually not stupid. The problem is that you're limited to just the things that
this card can touch, meaning that there's no impact
on the PCI express connectors that are going straight into
your graphics card here. And it also ignores that your sound card, even an onboard one like this, already has this kind of
filtering built into it. The thing is, the youngsters out there might not remember this, but there was a time when
onboard audio was so bad that a sound card was
a pretty integral part of any decent rig. I can actually remember
my first Sound Blaster like it was yesterday,
it was an Audigy 2 ZS and it was night and day. The difference was enough
to put tears in your eyes, like listening to the same songs. It was huge. So I'm not, poo-pooing
the fundamental idea here. It's just that we're looking at yesterday's solution, tomorrow. 'Cause for the most
part, those days are over and onboard audio is good enough for the value fast majority of people. But wait, Linus, you might
say, what about coil whine? If it doesn't, oh, oh, that's funny. Well, whatever we did this out of order, we already checked that
it doesn't help with that. It's horrible. So let's just conclude with this, given that we used the noisiest parts that we could find here in the studio and didn't perceive any difference, I wouldn't buy one of these. Instead I would suggest either investing in a decent power filter or a power bar for your entire system to eliminate ground loops and other noise, not to mention improve the
longevity of your power supply. Or if that isn't in the cards, maybe go pick up a
digital analog converter that sits outside of the PC itself, like one of these units from FiiO. By moving the signal
processing out of the PC's case to an external DAC and amp, you're isolating it from the
internal noise of your system. And yeah, yes, I know, some of it can still come through USB. But there are options out
there if you're that paranoid to further reduce that
potential crosstalk. At the end of the day bottom line is, a power filter isn't the
first thing you should try when it comes to improving
the quality of your sound. And if you're running
such a bad motherboard that you're getting hissing and crackling from your headphones or speakers, I think your $40 would
probably be better spent on a better motherboard that also improves the rest
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inventory and orders. So head over to squarespace.com/LTT and get 10% off your first purchase. By the way, if you guys enjoyed this video and you want to learn a little bit more about this setup here, we actually collabed
on this video with DMS. He's a smaller YouTuber but
he is super into this stuff and very knowledgeable so you can check out the
video we did with him and then maybe his channel. (electronic music)
