Following a ton of complaints from disgruntled buyers, Steve Burke and Gamers Nexus have spent the past few months purchasing and testing a couple of models of Gigabyte power supply units, to see if they could find out why so many of them are “exploding”.
The two PSUs in question—the GP-P750GM & GP-P850GM—were sold earlier this year by Newegg as part of a forced bundle, where anyone buying select RTX series GPUs had to buy the power supply along with it. A shitty move regardless of what happened next, but what happened next was that people started installing these PSUs and finding that they failed. A lot.
And not just fail, but sometimes fail spectacularly, with reports that a percentage of them were potentially “explosive”, in that they could catastrophically fail at a moment’s notice, producing sparks and sometimes frying any connected hardware along with it.
In an effort to wrangle all those anecdotes into something more scientific, Gamers Nexus have since February been buying up a ton of these units in bulk and testing them out. They found that while the P850 is bad, the P750 is criminally poor, with astronomical failure rates—50% of those they’d bought!—that ranged from simply arriving dead in the box to blowing up while testing, and taking GTX cards with them.
After taking a close look at the PSUs they found that they were questionable in terms of both design and the components used, and that, Gamers Nexus say, “Gigabyte and Newegg are ultimately dumping an unsellable product on desperate buyers.”
The full video, showing both all the testing and their documented results of the causes of the failures, is below (though note that it runs for around 30 minutes, so clear some time from your schedule before settling in).