PSU testers - will any of these do?

manveruppd · 26 Oct 2008 at 05:18

Was going to get the Xilence one OcUK offer but I noticed there's some available elsewhere for less.

There's a Thermaltake one, for instance, that's going for under £6 in a lot of places. The only downside is it seems to have only LEDs showing red or green rather than an LCD display showing the exact voltage output like the Xilence one.
There's also an Antec one that I'm not seriously considering cause it doesnt' seem to have inputs for individual cables, just the one for the 20/24-pin power cable, and a few no-brand ones that seem similar to the Thermaltake one but are slightly more expensive.

Is it basically a simple choice of pay £6 for a LED tester or £23 for an LCD one, or does the Xilence one do some other fancy tricks I don't know about? I need to check whether a particular SATA cable is providing enough juice - would it be useful for me to be able to see the exact voltage being pushed through rather than just a red or green LED?

manveruppd · 26 Oct 2008 at 14:56

bump, advice please?

AtaRo · 26 Oct 2008 at 15:44

get the cheapest one you can get and if you really must see the voltage on a particular cable invest in a multimeter you can get the one shown on the pix below for less than £30, the 1st/3rd is around £24.99.

manveruppd · 26 Oct 2008 at 15:47

I thought about that, a friend offered to lend me his multimetre, but I have no idea how I would go about testing a SATA cable with one without taking it apart to test the individual wires - and I'm far from confident in my ability to put it back together!

manveruppd · 26 Oct 2008 at 23:42

OK, I reckon I'll order the Xilence one sometime tonight then, unless someone can assure me that one of the cheaper ones will do for my purposes, or explain how to use a multimeter to test a specific cable.

EsaT · 27 Oct 2008 at 09:20

manveruppd said:
I thought about that, a friend offered to lend me his multimetre, but I have no idea how I would go about testing a SATA cable with one without taking it apart to test the individual wires - and I'm far from confident in my ability to put it back together!

All cables have same voltages because they all come from same source.
(unless some wire happens to be broken or wasn't attached to PCB)

manveruppd · 27 Oct 2008 at 14:10

Yeah that's the problem, I've had dodgy power cables before, I need to check if a particular one is working properly.