PSA: These Gigabyte power supplies might explode without warning

If you use or have built your own desktop, you’re probably aware of the golden rule: never cheap out on the power supply unit (PSU). It powers literally everything in your computer, and a bad PSU may lead to not just system failures, but damaged hardware and even a fire. Which is why it was quite alarming to hear that two of Gigabyte’s high end PSUs might be a safety risk to users.

The two models in question are the Gigabyte GP-P750GM and GP-P850GM which are 750W and 850W PSUs respectively. They come with 80+ Gold ratings, which ideally indicates that it’s a good PSU, but as the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus shows, that’s not exactly true. Issues first began when they noticed that half of the reviews for the 750W model were negative, with 40% of the reviews claiming that the Gigabyte PSU was dead on arrival.

Gamers Nexus then got hold of a number of these PSUs, and tore them apart only to find that Gigabyte seems to have sourced parts from a host of different vendors. Not only was the capacitors and transistors in the PSUs different among the 750W and 850W models, but they were also different in two supposedly identical 750W units. They weren’t too sure why this was the case; it could be that they changed parts supplier midway due to quality concerns, or maybe they sourced from various vendors to combat a parts shortage.

You can see the different capacitors used in supposedly identical units below. Notice the blue capacitors on the bottom of the left unit, while the same capacitors on the right are pink. Gamers Nexus also pointed out that they came from different manufacturers.

They went on to test the PSUs and found that for the most part, they turned off once they hit the over-power-protection (OPP), which is a failsafe built into the PSU when too much power is put into the PSU. While that is normal for most PSUs, one red flag here is that the OPP only kicked in at much higher wattages compared to its actual OPP rating.

However, while testing their fifth 750W PSU, one of its transistors failed and exploded mid-test. They then replicated the issue on another of Gigabyte’s 750W PSU and it again the same transistor exploded. The real issue is that it didn’t fail due to the OPP kicking in. Instead, these PSUs exploded while only at a 60% load. This is a fairly common power load for any desktop computer to be in.

You can check out the rest of the video for the full details, but it only gets worse here for Gigabyte. A test system built by Gamers Nexus using one of these PSUs led to a failed GPU in just 72 hours, although they couldn’t conclusively linked the failed GPU to the PSU itself.

Gamers Nexus does point out though that the same PSU had no issues when they swapped out the defective GPU for another one. Indeed, despite the large number of negative reviews, most customers who didn’t receive a dead-on-arrival PSU seemed to have no issue with it. Nevertheless, the quality of the transistors and capacitors remain questionable while the protection circuitry needs improvement.

We also checked Lazada and Shopee, and found that these Gigabyte PSUs are on sale here in Malaysia. However, none of the reviews there at time of writing indicate that any of the buyers received a bad PSU or had any issues after using it. That being said, knowing that these two PSU models have such issues means that you’ll probably want to be wary about it before making a purchasing decision.

It’s not been a good week for Gigabyte that’s for sure. They’ve just had to deal with a ransomware attack on their servers, and potentially had 112GB of their data stolen by hackers. The last thing they would’ve wanted on their plate is news that their power supply units may be defective too. We’ve reached out to someone from Gigabyte and we’ll update this article is they have a response to Gamers Nexus’ claims.

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