Protection Features Evaluation

Every PSU should be equipped with a set of protections, which will protect the PSU and, through it, the whole system. You can learn more about PSU protections by reading through the corresponding section of our "A Detailed Look Into PSUs" article.

In a snap, the most important protections for PSUs are the following:

• Over Current Protection (OCP)
• Over Power Protection (OPP)
• Over Temperature Protection (OTP)
• Over/Under Voltage Protection (OVP/UVP)
• Short Circuit Protection (SCP)
• No-load Operation (NLO)
• Surge & Inrush Protection (SIP)

We should note that OCP isn't usually offered in single +12V rail PSUs, especially high capacity ones. In these units, OPP takes over a part of the OCP's role. In addition, we find OTP to be of high importance, and we won't mess with OVP/UVP until we find a way to safely evaluate them.

There seem to be no realistic OCP triggering points on the 3.3V and 5VSB rails. The same goes for OPP since we stopped the test at around 1508 W load in order to avoid breaking the PSU (and possibly a piece of our equipment). Finally, there is no OTP, and inrush-current protection isn't properly implemented. Sirfa needs to work on this unit's protections; however, we seriously doubt it will bother to since this is a quite old platform.