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How long do power supplies last?
Most computer hardware somehow scales with something analogous to Moore's Law, so that when it's old enough, it's obsolete, and it doesn't matter if it still works. A twelve year old CPU or GPU would be slow today. Old memory or storage will be small today. Memory standards also change so that your old DDR2 module won't work with a modern CPU, anyway. Motherboards have to be replaced to support newer CPUs. DVD drives haven't changed much in many years, other than that most people don't use them anymore.
The two big exceptions are cases and power supplies, both of which are there for the sake of doing something physical, not something digital. Old cases might lack some modern amenities such as front USB 3 ports, but otherwise, still work until they break. And you can tell when a fan dies, for example, just by looking at it.
But power supplies are different. Savvy gamers know that the power supply matters, and you don't want some piece of junk that will threaten to fry your entire system. We also know that power supply performance tends to degrade with time as capacitors age, so something that's nice when new might not still be nice several years later. But physical components that aren't digital don't scale with Moore's Law, so they don't become obsolete for performance reasons.
That can make it tempting to reuse an old power supply when building a new computer. Is it okay to do that? The problem is that it takes specialized equipment to test power supplies, so for the most part, you don't know. You can guess that a two year old power supply will probably be fine and a twelve year old one probably not, but you don't really know.
In the sort of articles that makes it sad that the site is ending, Hard OCP went back and tested some old power supplies. They retested a Silverstone Olympia 1000 W and found that after 7 years of use, it could no longer deliver 1000 W, and the 12 V and 5 V output ripples were out of spec at 750 W with a 100 V input:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/09/silverstone_olympia_1000w_power_supply_7_year_redux/1
After 10 years of use, a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000 W died when they tried to pull 1000 W from it, which prevented them from retrying all of the tests:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/12/cooler_master_real_power_pro_1000w_psu_10_year_redux/1
That's not an indictment of Silverstone or Cooler Master. Those power supplies had been pretty good when new. That's why they had been bought and used by hardware enthusiasts. But as capacitors age, performance is going to get worse. That's just how our universe works.
That makes the latest article of retesting a Seasonic X-750 interesting:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/03/28/seasonic_x750_750w_psu_10_year_redux/
Unlike the others, the Seasonic unit was still able to deliver its full rated wattage after 10 years of use. Voltage regulation had gotten worse, but everything was still well within spec. Ripple was actually pretty good even by the standards of a brand new power supply launching today.
And as a whole, the power supply was decent by the standards of a new power supply today, even after 10 years of wear on it. You're not going to find a CPU or GPU or SSD from ten years ago that is still decent by today's standards, even without the intervening ten years of wear on it. Ten years ago, the only good SSD on the market was the Intel X25-M, which topped out at 160 GB, and there weren't yet any video cards that supported DirectX 11, let alone 12.
As Hard OCP correctly observes, they don't have a definitive answer for how long power supplies last, but they do have a few data points. And if you could pick a power supply to still be good after 10 years of use, the Seasonic X-series would be a good choice.
The Silverstone Olympia and Cooler Master Real Power Pro power supplies are relics of another era. They were nice for their era, but that era has come and gone. The Seasonic X-series is, in at least one important way, the first modern power supply.
ATX12V power supplies have to take in 120 V AC current and convert it to 12 V, 5 V, and 3.3 V DC output currents. Or for some places in the world, the input current is something higher like 230 V rather than 120 V, but it still needs the same output currents. Alternating current works much better than direct current for transmitting power over a distance of miles to get it to your house, but fluctuates far too much to be useful for directly driving computer hardware where an entire clock cycle can take less than a nanosecond.
Older power supplies would take that 120 V AC current and convert it directly to the 12 V, 5 V, and 3.3 V DC output currents. They could convert this much to 12 V, that much to 5 V, and so forth. They commonly couldn't deliver all of their wattage on the +12 V rail, even though modern computers want nearly all of it on that rail. In another era, there were CPUs that used the +3.3 V rail directly, but now, voltage has to vary constantly as the CPU runs for the sake of efficiency and has to be converted by the motherboard, which wants +12 V rather than something lower for the sake of efficiency.
The Seasonic X-series was the first to offer DC-DC voltage conversion. That is, the power supply would take the incoming 120 V AC and convert it all to +12 V DC. Then it could take that +12 V DC and further convert a little bit to +5 V or +3.3 V as needed. That offered the advantage that you could get the whole rated wattage on the +12 V rail. It also allowed better energy efficiency than needing physical hardware to convert 120 V AC directly to +5 V or +3.3 V DC.
Today, all of the power supplies that you should consider buying offer that DC-DC voltage conversion, as do a lot of ones that you shouldn't buy. That was the case several years ago, even.
Is that the reason for the X-series power supply's longevity? That's doubtful. It probably has more to do with Seasonic picking premium components because they knew that this was going to be their flagship. They set out to build the best consumer power supply ever made, and they succeeded.
One could argue that before the Seasonic X-series, the race was to build a better power supply. Ever since then, it's been known how to build a very nice power supply, and the race is how to do so more cheaply. One could argue that Seasonic's Focus series today isn't really any better than their X-series was, but it sure is cheaper. The X-750 had an MSRP of $200, while the Seasonic Focus Plus 750 W can be had today on New Egg for $95, or $70 after rebate.
Now, the Seasonic Focus Plus isn't as good as their Prime Titanium, for example. The Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium 750 W costs $200 on New Egg today, the same as the X-750 did ten years ago. The difference is that today, you can get an $80 power supply that is plenty good enough for a high-performance gaming rig. The $200 power supply isn't really that much better than it, because there just isn't room to be that much better.
The two big exceptions are cases and power supplies, both of which are there for the sake of doing something physical, not something digital. Old cases might lack some modern amenities such as front USB 3 ports, but otherwise, still work until they break. And you can tell when a fan dies, for example, just by looking at it.
But power supplies are different. Savvy gamers know that the power supply matters, and you don't want some piece of junk that will threaten to fry your entire system. We also know that power supply performance tends to degrade with time as capacitors age, so something that's nice when new might not still be nice several years later. But physical components that aren't digital don't scale with Moore's Law, so they don't become obsolete for performance reasons.
That can make it tempting to reuse an old power supply when building a new computer. Is it okay to do that? The problem is that it takes specialized equipment to test power supplies, so for the most part, you don't know. You can guess that a two year old power supply will probably be fine and a twelve year old one probably not, but you don't really know.
In the sort of articles that makes it sad that the site is ending, Hard OCP went back and tested some old power supplies. They retested a Silverstone Olympia 1000 W and found that after 7 years of use, it could no longer deliver 1000 W, and the 12 V and 5 V output ripples were out of spec at 750 W with a 100 V input:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/09/silverstone_olympia_1000w_power_supply_7_year_redux/1
After 10 years of use, a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000 W died when they tried to pull 1000 W from it, which prevented them from retrying all of the tests:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/12/cooler_master_real_power_pro_1000w_psu_10_year_redux/1
That's not an indictment of Silverstone or Cooler Master. Those power supplies had been pretty good when new. That's why they had been bought and used by hardware enthusiasts. But as capacitors age, performance is going to get worse. That's just how our universe works.
That makes the latest article of retesting a Seasonic X-750 interesting:
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/03/28/seasonic_x750_750w_psu_10_year_redux/
Unlike the others, the Seasonic unit was still able to deliver its full rated wattage after 10 years of use. Voltage regulation had gotten worse, but everything was still well within spec. Ripple was actually pretty good even by the standards of a brand new power supply launching today.
And as a whole, the power supply was decent by the standards of a new power supply today, even after 10 years of wear on it. You're not going to find a CPU or GPU or SSD from ten years ago that is still decent by today's standards, even without the intervening ten years of wear on it. Ten years ago, the only good SSD on the market was the Intel X25-M, which topped out at 160 GB, and there weren't yet any video cards that supported DirectX 11, let alone 12.
As Hard OCP correctly observes, they don't have a definitive answer for how long power supplies last, but they do have a few data points. And if you could pick a power supply to still be good after 10 years of use, the Seasonic X-series would be a good choice.
The Silverstone Olympia and Cooler Master Real Power Pro power supplies are relics of another era. They were nice for their era, but that era has come and gone. The Seasonic X-series is, in at least one important way, the first modern power supply.
ATX12V power supplies have to take in 120 V AC current and convert it to 12 V, 5 V, and 3.3 V DC output currents. Or for some places in the world, the input current is something higher like 230 V rather than 120 V, but it still needs the same output currents. Alternating current works much better than direct current for transmitting power over a distance of miles to get it to your house, but fluctuates far too much to be useful for directly driving computer hardware where an entire clock cycle can take less than a nanosecond.
Older power supplies would take that 120 V AC current and convert it directly to the 12 V, 5 V, and 3.3 V DC output currents. They could convert this much to 12 V, that much to 5 V, and so forth. They commonly couldn't deliver all of their wattage on the +12 V rail, even though modern computers want nearly all of it on that rail. In another era, there were CPUs that used the +3.3 V rail directly, but now, voltage has to vary constantly as the CPU runs for the sake of efficiency and has to be converted by the motherboard, which wants +12 V rather than something lower for the sake of efficiency.
The Seasonic X-series was the first to offer DC-DC voltage conversion. That is, the power supply would take the incoming 120 V AC and convert it all to +12 V DC. Then it could take that +12 V DC and further convert a little bit to +5 V or +3.3 V as needed. That offered the advantage that you could get the whole rated wattage on the +12 V rail. It also allowed better energy efficiency than needing physical hardware to convert 120 V AC directly to +5 V or +3.3 V DC.
Today, all of the power supplies that you should consider buying offer that DC-DC voltage conversion, as do a lot of ones that you shouldn't buy. That was the case several years ago, even.
Is that the reason for the X-series power supply's longevity? That's doubtful. It probably has more to do with Seasonic picking premium components because they knew that this was going to be their flagship. They set out to build the best consumer power supply ever made, and they succeeded.
One could argue that before the Seasonic X-series, the race was to build a better power supply. Ever since then, it's been known how to build a very nice power supply, and the race is how to do so more cheaply. One could argue that Seasonic's Focus series today isn't really any better than their X-series was, but it sure is cheaper. The X-750 had an MSRP of $200, while the Seasonic Focus Plus 750 W can be had today on New Egg for $95, or $70 after rebate.
Now, the Seasonic Focus Plus isn't as good as their Prime Titanium, for example. The Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium 750 W costs $200 on New Egg today, the same as the X-750 did ten years ago. The difference is that today, you can get an $80 power supply that is plenty good enough for a high-performance gaming rig. The $200 power supply isn't really that much better than it, because there just isn't room to be that much better.
Comments
Way back when, I used to re-use PSUs. I've probably still got some pookahed away that are near 20 years old. I wouldn't trust them to run a computer, but occasionally they are handy to have around.
In the past several years though, I've been keeping my older computers together as entire functional units, rather than piecemeal upgrading. Hence, I get a new PSU with each new build.
I just found for me, it made more sense to save up and buy an entire decent near-top-of-the-line rig, than to play the near-constant upgrade cycle that comes with lower end parts. And by having entire older rigs, they get passed down, sold off, or donating out, and that helps offset my new computer cost significantly. Sure, you can sell off old parts piecemeal as well, but I just don't like fooling with it.
My computer I built in late 2008, that one is still running today - an i7 920 w/ 6970. I don't game on it anymore, but it still gets used for work stuff and still runs Office/Chrome/etc just fine. My current rig just passed 4 years, and is still going fine (4790K w/ GTX980)...
I wouldn't reuse the PSU in either one of them, but I also wouldn't consider upgrading the PSU for any particular reason unless it failed.
We do have a server at work that's also 10+ years old. We replace HDDs and fans in that every 3 years, and have done the PSU every 5 (it's due for another one now). The old PSUs still work, but then again, so do the HDDs and fans - the entire reason there is to replace them when the likelihood of them failing (and the cost of that associated downtime) exceeds the cost of just replacing them outright.
What's the scoop?
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Im still using it now on my new system, must say was nervous when I upgraded but had no issues what so ever