Roy was right, GTR PSU’s are terrible.

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My GTR Power Com PS530 Plus ‘Chinesium‘ PSU blew up.

Roy called it!

Well, Roy called it. It’s a shame I don’t have footage as I didn’t really expect anything to happen, but I let the system run for a few days nothing much to report, I had mostly left it to idle, until the kids came in, and it became a YouTube, music machine. Again nothing much to report, I loaded some program to report CPU temperatures, and it was hovering under 30c. Not to bad.

With the kids gone, I thought I’d run FurMark to see how the GPU cooler is scaling as I suspect I should disassemble the video card, clean it up some, add new paste at least. So basically at 600×400 it was scaling about 1c ever second, just going vertical until it was in the 80c range. I’m not sure of the exact temp, but it was at least 80c and then the PSU shorted, shot electricity out the back, and let out some magical blue smoke. I yanked the power cable, and pulled the PSU, which was still hot to the touch.

Yikes!

Now granted the TDP of the E5-2620 v2 is 80 watts, and what I suspect is the killer, the graphics card, an ASUS Radeon R9 290x can consume up to 300 watts. I don’t know how much 4 sticks of RAM, and a M.2 drive will hit, but considering the PSU says 550 on the box, 530 on the sticker, I suspect going anywhere near 450 is really pushing it to the limits.

I pulled the card, and cleaned it up, and put in an ANTEC 650 PSU, and was amazed that the system powered up just fine. I even reran FurMark until it hit 75c, and killed it, and let it drop back to it’s idle temperature of 35c.

So yeah, the GRT PSU killed itself under load. I though that disclaimer in FurMark was a bit crazy, but no really it really can kill hardware! And I got lucky the only thing that died was the PSU, the machine is still happily running.

5 thoughts on “Roy was right, GTR PSU’s are terrible.”

    • Yeah no kidding.

      It’s amazing the weight difference between the Antec & the GTR. I was trying to keep costs down, since I’ve been trying to get more uh ‘college’ aged kids internships and whatnot. although that’s not going as well as I had hoped. and kids these days, can’t even imagine something like C, let alone assembly….

      • but don’t rely on weight to determine if PSU is good/high quality or not. There are low-tier PSUs use fake transformer filled with concrete/iron to increase weight.

        • I’m always amazed at the lengths some go through to scam people, when it would be easier to just build a better product.

          It’s sad when motherboards are higher quality than a psu.

  2. and for me, I’d trust a PSU at 1HKD per watt. If it is < 0.7HKD per watt you should really think if it is really capable to provide power as its label says.

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