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SolidGear power supply
Anyone have an opinion about SolidGear?
I have a box with an Asus board that suddenly rebooted to "prevent damage from power supply surge". From discussions online I can't tell whether the PS is faulty (it's fairly new) or whether the Asus surge sensor is faulty and should be disabled. |
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#2
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SolidGear power supply
Mayayana wrote:
Anyone have an opinion about SolidGear? I have a box with an Asus board that suddenly rebooted to "prevent damage from power supply surge". From discussions online I can't tell whether the PS is faulty (it's fairly new) or whether the Asus surge sensor is faulty and should be disabled. http://www.overclock.net/products/so...y/reviews/6552 I would wait and see if it does it again. A new p/s is a bit cheaper and easier to install than a new MB. |
#3
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SolidGear power supply
Mayayana wrote:
Anyone have an opinion about SolidGear? I have a box with an Asus board that suddenly rebooted to "prevent damage from power supply surge". From discussions online I can't tell whether the PS is faulty (it's fairly new) or whether the Asus surge sensor is faulty and should be disabled. "Anti-surge says unstable power supply" http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...e=en-us&page=2 Tis a strange function. Do you think that is properly documented somewhere ? The hardware monitor in the SuperI/O, is a single ADC, with an eight or nine channel mux on the front. It doesn't even read all the voltages at the same instant in time. It might be using SAR (successive approximation register) concept. That's really no better than using your $20 Harbor Freight multimeter, and expecting to catch something "peaking". When I look at the screen of mine, it looks like I'm getting maybe two readings per second on each voltage. If they used window comparators and did "V1 = V = V2" checking in the analog domain, that could be used to set an interrupt. But, you'd have no readings to look at later. All you'd know, is at some point, something went out of bounds. And to build that, costs money. Some hand-held PSU testers use a method like that (have a single LED indicating "in-spec" per rail). Asus do have some supervisor chips, for operating multi-phase Vcore and the like. Would there be a function in there ? What voltage does it monitor ? Vcore ? Or everything ? ******* I would probably disable the BIOS setting, if it was me. Unless I could be convinced it was a quality implementation and could actually measure something important. And what good does rebooting do, exactly ? Besides **** you off ? Shutting down would make some sense. But on the other hand, the act of shutting down (depending on timing), might cause a surge behavior to become worse. ******* The Asus representative here, leads me to believe it is the "naive" SuperI/O hardware implementation of the function, complete with too-low sampling rate to be effective. https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthrea...tem-Faulty-PSU "If there is any polling going on with multiple tools on the system, the Super IO will mis-read, and this can generate a shutdown. If that happens to be the case, disable Anti-Surge, then reinstall the APC software." That would be my assumption about how it works. Just an attempt to read the Hardware Monitor ADC, and conclude something from it. Back when the SuperI/O was on the SMBUS, readout errors were an epidemic, because one utility could "stomp" on the serial bus access of the other utility. Modern systems use the 33MHz LPC bus, and as far as I know, once a transaction kicks off, it completes. Readout errors should not happen. Assuming everything involved here has the appropriate "interlocks" so that the operations can complete properly. For example, if your read the Hardware Monitor, it should not upset any reading currently in progress. There should be no timing windows where that can happen, if the Hardware Monitor is worth having and using. At one time, one of the developers of hardware readout software, attempted to get all the parties to agree to a semaphore scheme, so there would not be bus stomping. He got no-where fast. ******* It turns out my new motherboard has this "anti-surge" feature, and I didn't even notice. The setting is down the screen, and I'd have to scroll down to see it. It is enabled by default. This picture is selected chunks of a 12Mpixel digital camera shot. https://s27.postimg.org/gm31udhhv/anti_surge.jpg So what do I notice. The setting is right below the voltage the Hardware monitor measures. The text claims If enabled, system will have uvp or ovp protect function One would hope the function was "and", not "or". Implying they are using the formfactors +/-5% allowance on the rails. It's unclear what kind of number would be useful on VCore. The tolerance on that should be quite good, whereas the best place to measure it is a problem. Now, sitting in the BIOS, how do my readings vary ? There is some oscillation. This is really quite reasonable. Only the 12V rail is ridiculous. It is *not* sitting there precisely at 12.000V. I don't know what is going on there. It's like it was nailed down or something. Like, a dummy reading. At least the others, the voltages are "realistic", like they were coming from a cheap power supply or a cheap instrument. Vcore 1.102, 1.104, 1.106 3.3V 3.328, 3.344 5V 5.080, 5.120 12V 12.000 --- hilarious, doesn't move Each rail has scaling. The ADC is 8 bit, meaning 1 of 256 values. The metering reads from 0 to 4.096V or 0.016V per step. The 12V input would be around 16V full scale. The front end resistive divider (external to the ADC) would attenuate the signal by multiplying it by 0.25. So when you see 12.000 on the screen, if the setting were to move, it would be by 0.064V. It's allowed 5% or 0.600V. That means we have ten measurement steps roughly on the ADC, between being perfectly centered, and hitting "OVP". The 3.3V on the other hand, you should be able to see that one is unscaled. The converter reads 4.096V full scale, and immediately you can see the two readings that it oscillates between, are 0.016V apart. Again, you get about ten measurement steps before you hit the 5% mark. The power supply itself is far from perfect. There is a static offset error on the voltage. The reason they give 5%, is because it might need 3% on a shared feedback design, just for the realizable error. I would estimate there isn't all that much wiggle room, if you set the alarm at +/-5%. And maybe it needs an even larger allowance before going to "alarm state". Have a stare at your hardware monitor screen in the BIOS, and see how much "wiggling" it is doing. The BIOS is not much of a load for the PSU, so the wiggling should be quite small. If a power supply 12V rail is "really defective", you will hear some cooling fan speed variation. There is enough of a speed change, you can hear it wandering in terms of rotational speed. That's how I've detected PSU problems on two supplies in the past. And by all means, check that the main PSU connector is seated. It has a locking latch for a reason, so thermal expansion cannot cause it to "back out" on its own. Make sure it is latched. And how is ATX12V monitored, compared to the 12V wire on the main connector ? Well, the Hardware Monitor was never designed to be a monitor that monitors every wire bundle. It may be able to warn you the main connector is loose, or the ATX12V is loose, but it cannot monitor all of them. There aren't enough channels for that. Paul |
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SolidGear power supply
On Sun, 5 Feb 2017 20:39:25 -0500, Mayayana wrote:
Anyone have an opinion about SolidGear? I have a box with an Asus board that suddenly rebooted to "prevent damage from power supply surge". From discussions online I can't tell whether the PS is faulty (it's fairly new) or whether the Asus surge sensor is faulty and should be disabled. I've disabled it on my Asus boards. Whenever there is a power cut they always claim to have detected a power surge when the power comes back. I can't remember why I didn't like that now though. I think they started up themselves after a power cut and I've got them set to not boot on power on until I press the power button. I've got them connected to a KVM and it the booting PC is not selected it screws up the display settings. -- Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2 and built in 5 years; UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/ |
#5
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SolidGear power supply
Thanks to everyone. After reading these posts I
looked into it further. Turns out my current machine also has a SolidGear, with the same MB. And surge protection is enabled. I never noticed. But while HWMonitor shows almost no movement on my machine if I'm not doing anything in particular, the new box shows cpu vcore going between .8 and 1.3. It also shows 3.3v and 12v values varying by at least a few hundredths. The +12v reading, at 8+, is varying by about .15. So there seems to be almost a regular oscillation. The readings are also in different ranges on the two machines, with the same PS and MB, but different CPU. My current machine shows almost constant 1.73 for cpu vcore and shows +12v around 11. I have no experience with this so I have no idea what normal range is, but that seems like an awfully lot of variation. |
#6
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SolidGear power supply
Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Mayayana wrote: Anyone have an opinion about SolidGear? I have a box with an Asus board that suddenly rebooted to "prevent damage from power supply surge". From discussions online I can't tell whether the PS is faulty (it's fairly new) or whether the Asus surge sensor is faulty and should be disabled. http://www.overclock.net/products/so...y/reviews/6552 I would wait and see if it does it again. A new p/s is a bit cheaper and easier to install than a new MB. There is a lot of contracting-out, in the PSU industry. Some companies, actually do design their own stuff. Fortron/Sparkle, Seasonic, Enermax, they would make their own. Even when companies make their own, they are not above contracting out themselves, and buying a really cheap supply to fill the lowest tier. Always be suspicious. Companies like Antec, contract the stuff. They've bought lots of them from ChannelWell, but later switched to Delta for some of the units. The quality and internal design, varies with the source. The Delta probably has the noisy fan. So when you see a "brand name", next you have to decide what "tier" the supply is in. Some of the 80+, initially they would all have been coming from Seasonic. Somebody probably has a patent on double-forward-conversion, and then other parties might have to pay a licensing fee. On an 80+ supply, conversion can be in two stages. The massive 12V main rail. And a separate circuit card has the +3.3V and +12V converters. They run off +12V. So there are two converters in a row. The 80+ supply gets most of its efficiency, when the user does not load the 3.3V or 5V that heavily. The power drawn from the "double path", is less efficient than the power from the "single path". The hope is, your CPU and GPU are loading that 12VDC rail. 400VDC ------------- 5VSB + convert | 110AC -------+-- 12VDC -------- 3.3V, 5V board convert | convert | | v v v The 5VSB standby voltage is used when sleeping. The fan goes off. The front-end rectifiers continue to run. The active PFC continues to run, which boosts the voltage on the main filter cap a bit. The +5VSB converter runs off the same 400V rail as the main supply, but uses an economical converter suited to the tiny load it supports. The wasted power can be down in the 0.5W to 1W range for standby. (In other words, if you select "Shutdown" in Windows, and the +5VSB converter is running, and RAM contents are not preserved, the PSU power wastage drops to the 0.5W level.) So when we do your surge analysis of that whacking pile of converters, there should be very little cross-loading, and generally the outputs should be well behaved. And not be tripping any "anti surge" feature :-) The old supplies without PFC, were simpler. 350VDC ------------- 5VSB + convert | 110AC -------+-- 12VDC --- Single feedback loop. convert 5VDC --- Loading one heavily, affects 3.3VDC --- the voltage on the others. The main converter switches off when you sleep, hibernate, or shutdown. The 5VSB provides power for RAM, while sleeping, and for stuff like Wake On LAN. If there is a "load step" on the outputs, as I understand it, it might take 1-1.5 milliseconds for the loop to respond. The supply can have 5000uF of filter caps (without affecting stability), so they have an impact on the dynamics. If the motherboard had too many filter caps, the PSU might become unstable, and there are limits the motherboard makers know about. So while some of you might be thinking "let's put a Farad across that thing", actually that will make it less stable. Paul |
#7
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SolidGear power supply
Mayayana wrote:
Thanks to everyone. After reading these posts I looked into it further. Turns out my current machine also has a SolidGear, with the same MB. And surge protection is enabled. I never noticed. But while HWMonitor shows almost no movement on my machine if I'm not doing anything in particular, the new box shows cpu vcore going between .8 and 1.3. It also shows 3.3v and 12v values varying by at least a few hundredths. The +12v reading, at 8+, is varying by about .15. So there seems to be almost a regular oscillation. The readings are also in different ranges on the two machines, with the same PS and MB, but different CPU. My current machine shows almost constant 1.73 for cpu vcore and shows +12v around 11. I have no experience with this so I have no idea what normal range is, but that seems like an awfully lot of variation. First, don't panic. The purpose of the Hardware Monitor, is as a Warning. The scaling math isn't always correct on the Hardware Monitor. In many cases, it seems the 12V signal has the wrong scaling resistor values recorded for it. At one time, the Speedfan guy or the MBM5 guy, were collecting info on a mobo by mobo basis. The scaling resistors were figured out manually. Now, the scale factors are stored in BIOS ACPI somewhere, and this means a reduction in labor to get the correct values. In any case, you can use a regular multimeter on "volts" to verify the actual voltages. One of the rules is to clip the black lead onto an I/O screw on the back of the computer. This is easier said than done, because most multimeters do not have good accessory kits. I bought separate alligator clips from the RadioShack long ago, but even then, my gear isn't all that good. So I can use one of my extender wires, with alligator clips on either end, to connect the multimeter black probe to an I/O screw in the I/O plate area. That leaves just the red probe to wave around, while you work. Set the multimeter on 20V fullscale, and probe a few things. A 1x4 Molex gives access to 5V and 12V. If the 12V is wavering, that connector is all you need to check it. A PSU with "real" SATA power, has an orange wire for 3.3V, but there's no safe way to probe that. The main PSU connector, most times you can barely see it, for the jumble of stuff in the computer case. In theory, you can slip the red probe of the multimeter, between the plastic connector shell, and where the wire goes into the main connector. There is exposed metal for each pin, and you can take a reading off that, even when the connector is seated on the motherboard. It's easier to probe the main connector, if the motherboard is out on your test bench in the open. I have two meters here, that have RS232 ports. And more importantly, at least one of them, I was able to find a schematic, and discover the meter has proper opto-isolation, so you can probe circuits at voltage, without a flow path forming through the multimeter and into the PC. The purpose of having a multimeter with an RS232 port, is if you need to log readings over a period of time. So my best setup is: 1) Separate 9VDC wall wart with 9V battery terminals on the end. The wall wart has no safety ground, and floats. 2) Multimeter with RS232. I power the multimeter with (1). 3) Connect the RS232 from the multimeter to the computer doing the logging. 4) Record voltages to my hearts content, safe in the knowledge that the meter won't run the battery down. Note - meters have auto-power-off normally. If the meter senses the RS232 is being used, it's supposed to disable that, but you never know what will happen until the meter powers off on you. But that's only if you need a history or a log file. If you pay $1000+ for a multimeter, some of those models can make up to 1000 readings a second. Which might be close enough, to do real "surge detection" :-) If you need higher speed analysis than that, you need an oscilloscope. Even a few meter readings is better than nothing. As it will expose any rubbish coming from the computer. An example being, the 12.000V reading coming out of my new computer. Something I need to check now, as it looks "fake". Some computer hardware monitors read 15V on the 12V output, and when you check with the multimeter, the power supply is making 12.1 or so. A harbor freight meter isn't going to be all that accurate, but at least it won't be reading 15V. As long as you don't use the two multimeter probes in close proximity, so they can short together, you won't be seeing a "light show". My buddy at work one evening, shorted out a 5V supply, and there was a burst of white light, that threw his shadow on the ceiling. That's about as good a reason as any, not to short out one of those really powerful supplies. An IC leg burned off almost instantly, and that's where the white light came from. The 5V supply he was working on, had a 100A rating. Like a kind of arc welder. I'm just glad he didn't bump his head, getting away from the thing (he was partially inside the equipment at the time). Paul |
#8
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SolidGear power supply
Paul wrote:
Paul in Houston TX wrote: There is a lot of contracting-out, in the PSU industry. (snip) Quite interesting. Thanks Paul. |
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