Building DIY Gaming PC Power Supply on a Budget

Building a gaming PC power supply from off-the-shelf components is feasible, cost-effective, and can power a mid-tier gaming PC.

### DIY Gaming PC Power Supply: A Cost-Effective Challenge
* 💰  Building your own PC power supply can be a cost-effective project, with Pico power supply modules available for as little as **$20 to $30**.
* 🛠️  DIY power supplies lack the ability to **convert household AC to DC power**, requiring a separate **12V power brick** that can **negate potential savings**.
* 🔌  Combining multiple basic power bricks or using a high-current 12V power supply are considered but present challenges such as **voltage differences** and **overloading**.
* 🔧  Quality PC power supplies, like the Seic unit, are distinguished by features such as **filtering capacitors**, **voltage regulation modules**, and **rectifiers with proper cooling**.
* 🔥  Salvaging a 12V power supply from a fat PS3 is a recommended approach, as these units are **powerful, readily available**, and feature a **compatible connector**.
* 🎮  The DIY power supply successfully powers a gaming PC, running Cyberpunk 2077, but fails when pushed to its **maximum rated output of 384 watts**.
* 💡  While the DIY project is functional, its value is debatable due to potential risks and limitations, making pre-built solutions like **Seic's upcoming models** a more practical choice.
* 🔜  Seic's next-generation power supplies feature an innovative "**optis sync**" design, promising **increased efficiency, performance, and reliability** at a **lower cost**.

if building your own gaming PC is better than buying a stuffy pre-built one, then why not build your own power supply instead of buying a stuffy pre-built one? Performance, availability, compatibility, safety, okay, all right. Buzz kills, but it is absolutely possible with off-the-shelf components and a can-do attitude. You don't even have to assemble that much. Pico power supply modules like this one used to be expensive, hard to find, but these days you can get ones that claim to handle up to a mid-tier gaming PC for as little as $20 to $30. Of course, you will need some additional bits, but by the time we were finished, and this really is it, we had a power supply for under $40 that not only powers the gaming PC that you're looking at right here, but even survived a trip to the lab with what I would call acceptable results. So why don't people do this all the time? Well, let me put it this way. When Seic heard we were going to attempt this, they volunteered to

sponsor the video as a demonstration of their confidence that nothing we show you today is going to harm their sales. All right, Seic Challenge accepted. Let's lay out our plan starting with a run-down of these things. We call them PCO PSUs, but in a world first somehow the AliExpress description might be more appropriate than our generally accepted term because this is not a power supply, at least not in the way that we'd think of it. It's got some power supply characteristics like its 24-pin ATX connector that goes into your motherboard, its step-down converters for 3.3 and 5V, as well as a few small capacitors for smoothing. But what it lacks is any way of converting your household AC to the DC power that your electronics absolutely need in order to function. That is the part of your traditional power supply that realistically is doing the heavy lifting, and the 12V power brick that you need in order to make one of these fully functional pretty much wipes out any potential savings from a

DIY unit, at least it would if we had to buy one. 12-volt power is used for all kinds of things like smart lighting, accessory charging, and even to power small household appliances. The issue that we run into is that these devices use very small amounts of it, and desktop computers need a lot. Now, one option we did legitimately consider was combining multiple basic power bricks. I mean the 450 W version of our Pico PSU here actually has two barrel plugs for two inputs, so if two is good, then more must be better, right? Well, wrongish. The thing is we only really considered this to illustrate why it usually isn't a great idea. If both power supplies are the same, it's not the worst thing, but even two units of the same model might have slightly different output voltages, which can lead to back feeding, voltage drops, or unexpected side effects. And if the two power supplies are rated for very different output amperages, one could end up overloaded while the other is underloaded. Our next brilliant idea was to look for the

cheapest high current 12-volt power supply we could find. This one is typically used for big LED arrays and can do up to 240 or 250 Watts depending on how you do the math. Let's see how it goes. We do still have some other ideas to get over the finish line here, but before we do, let's talk about what differentiates a quality PC power supply like this one from our sponsor cic from a bottom of the barrel unit like this one. A quick word of warning, by the way, guys, while our LTT screwdriver LTT store.com is a high-quality screwdriver, it does nothing to protect you from the dangers of opening a power supply, and you should not be doing this yourself unless you are a professional and positive that you know how to avoid electrocuting yourself. And with that done, I think it's pretty apparent which one is better, even if you have no idea what any of this stuff does. But for the sake of education, let's explain it. Filtering capacitors smooth out the

delivery of power without them a sudden Spike or drop in voltage recurrent can cause some big issues on cic. These are large and plentiful, made by Nipon Chemicon, one of the top brands of Japanese caps. If you were to try to reverse engineer this unit, this bad boy cap right here would cost you like $6 on its own. Over here we've got a handful of electrolytic caps from the likes of Chong X and DK, both of which have some pretty stellar reviews online. Voltage regulation modules, you know them, you love them, they ensure that your components get exact the voltages they need on the seic unit they're attached to. A 90° daughter board with a big Toral coil for each different voltage on our no name there are none vrm Duties are handled on our picco unit with RB boards using what appears to be a cloned Texas instrument switching regulator along with these 4.7 microhenry inductor coils. Moving on to rectifiers, these are usually just a series of diodes that turn AC into DC on

our cic unit they're in fan made attached to nice big heat sinks, with a fan right above them. Meanwhile, on our no-name power supply, they're made by Fairchild and Vishay General Semiconductor, both actually respectable Brands this time, assuming they're genuine. But in terms of cooling, um, they're just what thermal padded to the outside of the chassis. On the subject of cooling, Seic has a follow-up to this unit that has some cool innovations that I'm going to talk about later. First, I want to show you how we can complete our mission of our near-zero budget power supply. And if you guessed it was Facebook Marketplace to the rescue, you're right. Now, anyone savvy enough to remove the power supply from their electronic Gizmo is going to know that it's worth something on its own. So, save yourself some trouble, don't search for 12-volt power supply or power supply for thing X, search for broken thing X, a for parts gaming laptop or Mini PC is a really good start, some of them use

proprietary plugs, and often get discarded plugs that can just be cut off to get access to the good juicy wires. With that said, most laptop bricks these days are actually 20 volts, so we would need to Buck the power down to 12, which requires additional parts and labor that we don't want to deal with. Fortunately, there are other options. Game consoles typically hit their cheapest point when they're two generations old, meaning that Wiis, PS3s, and Xbox 360s are cheap and plentiful right now. Now, the 360 went through a ton of revisions, with the first unit being both the most power-hungry and the most likely to fail. So, a 203-watt brick from a red-ringed Xbox could be a great candidate for our use case, except that the proprietary connector is a bit more of a hassle than usual in this case, and there's no reason to deal with that when there's a better alternative: the fat PS3. Now, there were probably more versions of the PS3 than most people realize of the 120 volts.

models. There were 19 different power supplies made by five different companies, ranging from 160 Watts all the way up to a whopping 399 watts. Of them, the most powerful four all came from fat PS3s manufactured between 2006 and 2008, with these codes in their part numbers. Now, models A and B are worth their weight in gold on account of their PS2 backwards compatibility, but the other three can be found for about 20 bucks fairly easily, or even for free if they're broken. The best thing about these early model PS3 power supplies, though, is that they attach to the motherboard with cylindrical plugs that perfectly fit a standard 4mm banana plug, the kind that you might find on consumer audio equipment. Just make sure that if your banana plug has a metal housing, though, that it is completely covered so that you don't accidentally start a fire while you're digging through the trash of your local stereo store for banana plugs. By the way, be sure to grab some 12 gauge stereo wire as it will work.

perfectly for carrying this much current. Any smaller though, and yeah, you're going to be back in fire bill. Then we jumper pins one and five on this little white connector right here. That's the equivalent of jumpering the green and black wires on an ATX power supply plug in our salvaged AC socket here. And I think it's time to power it on. Let's see what happens. And there we have it. Not only is it working, we're running Cyberpunk 2077. I mean on a 4060, so you know, it doesn't look amazing, but it's running. The whole system is even shockingly quiet. Does this PS3 power supply even have a fan in it? No. Oh, is that bad? Yes. Ah, okay. So you might want to account for another couple of dollars in your $40 budget if you wanted to replicate something like this. But I think there is one more question remaining, and that is whether you would even want to. Why don't we send this thing over to the labs to test and

this time, I'm taking off your cute little test is 275-watt sticker that was to ensure that it survived. The first time around, let's take it all the way to the limit. When we first gave this to Lucas from the labs team for testing, we asked him to treat it like a 275-watt power supply since that's all we really needed for our PC. That increased its odds of survival but probably also negatively impacted its efficiency numbers. So let's try that again. And it's rated 384 watts of output. So it, it died. Yeah. Well, it did manage to be a little bit more efficient but at the cost of the power supply as a whole. In conclusion, does it work? Yes. Um, is it worth it? I'll let you be the judge of that. But if you decide that this looks like a lot of hassle for not a lot of benefit, why don't you check out our sponsor, Seic. Their upcoming focus and core power supplies moved several of the heat-generating components onto a dedicated daughter board that includes a

perforated copper ground plane, essentially acting as a heat sink within the PCB itself. This allows them to dissipate more heat using less space. And cic told us that this new optis sync design, as they call it, will be eight times more efficient at conducting heat and offer an increase in both performance and reliability long term. And because optis sync is also cheaper to produce, seic is launching the next generation of focus units at $10 less than the MSRP of the current V3 models. You can expect them to show up sometime late this year. And we're going to have a link to them down below where you can learn more. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time seic made a power supply that put the buck converters and connectors into a separate chassis. It was pretty wild, and I kind of wish it caught on.

I Built my own Power Supply (don't do it)

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Building Your Own Power Supply: Is It Worth It?

Building your own power supply for a gaming PC is possible with off-the-shelf components and can cost under $40.

However, the need for a 12V power brick and the potential safety risks make it less practical and cost-effective.

Combining multiple power bricks is also not recommended due to potential voltage issues and overloading.

The Importance of Quality PC Power Supply

A high-quality PC power supply is crucial for stable power delivery and avoiding voltage fluctuations.

The use of top brands for filtering capacitors and voltage regulation modules sets apart a reliable power supply from a lower quality one.

The presence of rectifiers for converting AC to DC power is also a key factor to consider in differentiating power supply units.

DIY power supply units can be obtained from discarded electronics like gaming laptops and game consoles.

The use of broken or discarded devices with proprietary plugs can provide the necessary wires for the power supply.

Older models of game consoles like the Xbox 360 and fat PS3s are highlighted as affordable and practical options for this purpose.

The Power and Compatibility of Early Model PS3 Power Supplies

Early model PS3 power supplies, particularly from the fat PS3s made between 2006 and 2008, are the most powerful and sought after, with some being easily accessible for a low price.

These power supplies have the advantage of attaching to the motherboard with cylindrical plugs that fit a standard 4mm banana plug, but using them comes with the risk of potential fire hazards.

Additionally, they may need additional investment for a fan, making the replication process more costly.

The Impact of Increasing Power Supply Wattage on Efficiency

The power supply was initially tested as a 275-watt unit, increasing its chances of survival but potentially decreasing efficiency.

When retested at 384 watts, it was more efficient but ultimately failed.

The sponsor, Seic, is launching a new, more efficient power supply design at a lower cost.