Gigabyte Sumo Power Silver 900 W Review

Name: Gigabyte Sumo Power Silver 900 W
Brand: GIGABYTE

crmaris

on Jan 11th, 2012,

in Power Supplies.

Manufacturer: GIGABYTE

Performance Rating & Performance per Dollar »

Ripple Measurements

In the following table you will find the ripple levels that we measured on the main rails of Sumo Power 900W. According to ATX specification the limits are 120 mV (+12V) and 50 mV (5V, 3.3V and 5VSB).

Ripple Measurements Gigabyte GE-H900A-D1
Test	12 V	5 V	3.3 V	5VSB	Pass/Fail
20% Load	28.3 mV	19.8 mV	16.0 mV	10.8 mV	Pass
40% Load	38.8 mV	20.9 mV	17.0 mV	11.8 mV	Pass
50% Load	44.2 mV	21.7 mV	17.5 mV	14.6 mV	Pass
60% Load	50.2 mV	21.9 mV	18.2 mV	15.3 mV	Pass
80% Load	63.4 mV	24.5 mV	20.2 mV	17.2 mV	Pass
100% Load	83.5 mV	26.3 mV	24.6 mV	24.5 mV	Pass
Crossload 1	38.2 mV	23.6 mV	24.6 mV	10.4 mV	Pass
Crossload 2	78.6 mV	26.0 mV	20.2 mV	17.5 mV	Pass

Let's start with the good news. Ripple suppression on the minor rails and at 5VSB is quite good although not the best we have ever seen, that's for sure. Unfortunately this is not the case for the most important rail of all, +12V, where ripple reaches up to 83.5mV. Although the limit of this rail is 120mV, we expect to see better than 60mV in a good PSU and better than 30mV from a high-end model. So the Sumo Power 900W simply let us down in ripple suppression. Apparently the topology it uses has a problem with ripple suppression on +12V and the lack of extra filtering caps highlighted this.

Ripple at Full Load

In the following oscilloscope screenshots you can see the AC ripple and noise that the main rails registered (+12V, 5V, 3.3V and 5VSB). The bigger the fluctuations on the oscilloscope's screen the bigger the ripple/noise. For all measurements we set 0.01 V/Div (each vertical division/box equals to 0.01V) as standard.