PSU Tester - recommendations

[Ditto]

Would anyone recommend a PSU tester. There are some on Amazon for under £10 and some nearer £20 and others higher still. I have a number of Optiplex 390/790 SFF PSUs to test and want to spend a minimal amount, but want to avoid anything that'll die in no time or is an electrical risk!

[synaesthesia]

Not really; multimeter and a paperclip is all you ever need which would do more than the cheap (under £100 testers) would be capable of as they can't correctly simulate load for proper testing. Once it passes the paperclip test then stick it in a test board and run something on it for a few minutes.

[Ditto]

One of the more unusual cases that I've seen is a PG signal (Power Good) value of 0 milliseconds. I know the dedicated testers can cater for this - is the same possible with a multimeter? Edited February 27, 2020 by Ditto

[mrbios]

I've always had a cheap one in a draw at work, purely for testing the output of the 12v 3.3v and 5v rails, basically no more intelligent than a multimeter but tests all 3 at once. Never had any load testing devices, though i do have about 50 spare power supplies so not much need to delve that deep

[john]

Ive always had a 20 quid tester I got from Overclockers think it was a few years ago it removes the need of the paperclip as its designed for that job, it does a basic is it ok and alive feature and has multi-meter points and shows you which points to do to what and what range should be its from Antec if i remember

[Chris_Cook]

They have their place, but if I had a choice, I would get a multi meter first as its more versatile.

 

A PSU is going to fail in a few different ways and a PSU tester won't reveal all of them.

 

They will either output each voltage, not output one or more voltages at all, or give the wrong voltage, or have too much ripple (variation in voltage). Ripple can either be caused by overloading the PSU, or due to age/quality of components.

 

In order to check the actual voltage level or ripple you will need to have the PSU plugged into the system it will be used in. The output voltage is dependent on the load that its plugged into.

 

You would need a multi-meter to actually check each voltage is within 10% of its spec.

 

To check ripple, you will really need an oscilloscope which may be out of the budget for most IT departments. (But your science dept might have one you could borrow).

 

Where they are useful is if you want to quickly check if its working at all.