Why are Inline capacitors

[AnalogCanavity]

So I currently have a Seasonic Prime 650W and when I was helping my friend with a build, I found out that Seasonic made a new prime series: The Seasonic Prime Ultra. I looked up the differences but not much changed, but I didn’t get 1 part, what are inline capacitors? And what do they do. Also if anyone could explain the SATA 3.3 connectors that would be great!

@STRMfrmXMN

 

 

Thanks 

[seon123]

Capacitors in the cables. They reduce ripple, but can be annoying. The Platinum and Gold versions had in cable capacitors, the Titanium didn't. 

For SATA 3.3

Quote

To sum up, for products supporting the optional SATA 3.3 power disable (PWDIS) function, the third pin (P3) of the SATA connector is now assigned as the Power Disable Control pin. If P3 is driven HIGH (2.1V-3.6V), the power to the drive circuitry will be cut. All drives with this optional feature will not power up if a legacy SATA connector is used. This is because P3 driven HIGH will prevent the drive from powering up. The easy, and not so elegant, solution is to use a 4-pin Molex to SATA connector or a power supply equipped with SATA connectors that follow the SATA 3.3 specification.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-feature,36146.html

[AnalogCanavity]

8 minutes ago, seon123 said:

Capacitors in the cables. They reduce ripple, but can be annoying. The Platinum and Gold versions had in cable capacitors, the Titanium didn't. 

For SATA 3.3

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-feature,36146.html

So does the prime ultra titanium made everything else more efficient so the could remove the inline capacitors?

 

Thanks

[seon123]

6 minutes ago, Zic05 said:

So does the prime ultra titanium made everything else more efficient so the could remove the inline capacitors?

 

Thanks

The efficiency doesn't have anything to do with the in cable capacitors. The Primes were already good enough that having the in cable capacitors were arguably worse than having the ripple without them. 

Among the original Primes, only the Titanium had no in cable capacitors. The Gold and Platinum had in cable capacitors. 

For the Prime Ultras, none of them have in cable capacitors. 

[STRMfrmXMN]

1 hour ago, Zic05 said:

So I currently have a Seasonic Prime 650W and when I was helping my friend with a build, I found out that Seasonic made a new prime series: The Seasonic Prime Ultra. I looked up the differences but not much changed, but I didn’t get 1 part, what are inline capacitors? And what do they do. Also if anyone could explain the SATA 3.3 connectors that would be great!

@STRMfrmXMN

 

 

Thanks 

seon beat me to it

[AnalogCanavity]

1 minute ago, STRMfrmXMN said:

seon beat me to it

Just one more question what is “ripple”.

 

Thanks

[STRMfrmXMN]

10 hours ago, Zic05 said:

Just one more question what is “ripple”.

 

Thanks

The less, the better.

 

How much voltage supplied to your PSU's rails fluctuates. So (we'll use 12V ripple as an example) you want to be as little as possible, so that your 12V rail is not breaking the voltage of 11.9V or 12.1V too often. It's normal for all PSUs to have ripple. A very good PSU will generally have maybe 20 mV of ripple on the 12V rail, meaning you might see the 12V rail output 11.8V at some point and 12.2V at some point. It's not unusual to go up to 12.5V but it's starting to throw caution to the wind.

 

Extreme ripple causes wear and tear on your motherboard's electronics, to your GPU, to your hard drives, and who knows what else will die prematurely if you use a crappy PSU.

 

[OrionFOTL]

2 hours ago, STRMfrmXMN said:

A very good PSU will generally have maybe 20 mV of ripple on the 12V rail, meaning you might see the 12V rail output 11.8V at some point and 12.2V at some point.

20 mV of +12V ripple would mean that it fluctuates for example from 12.00V to 12.02V. One decimal place too much. Your example of 11.8V to 12.2V would be 400mV.

 

And it's not really "at some point", because that comes close to just voltage regulation - it's more like it goes up and down thousands of times in a second.

 

The charts in your post show ATX voltage tolerances, not ripple.

ATX ripple limits are 120mV for +12V, and 50mV for the minor rails.

[STRMfrmXMN]

8 hours ago, OrionFOTL said:

20 mV of +12V ripple would mean that it fluctuates for example from 12.00V to 12.02V. One decimal place too much. Your example of 11.8V to 12.2V would be 400mV.

 

And it's not really "at some point", because that comes close to just voltage regulation - it's more like it goes up and down thousands of times in a second.

 

The charts in your post show ATX voltage tolerances, not ripple.

ATX ripple limits are 120mV for +12V, and 50mV for the minor rails.

Gotcha, thanks for pointing that out. Wee hours of the morning + copy-pasting the closest thing I could find from JG or wherever I got that was probably a mistake

[AnalogCanavity]

On 9/19/2018 at 10:33 AM, seon123 said:

The efficiency doesn't have anything to do with the in cable capacitors. The Primes were already good enough that having the in cable capacitors were arguably worse than having the ripple without them. 

Among the original Primes, only the Titanium had no in cable capacitors. The Gold and Platinum had in cable capacitors. 

For the Prime Ultras, none of them have in cable capacitors. 

So what makes the prime titanium and the prime ultra Seris “good enough” so that the don’t need inline capacitors.

 

Thanks 

[17030644]

27 minutes ago, Zic05 said:

So what makes the prime titanium and the prime ultra Seris “good enough” so that the don’t need inline capacitors.

 

Thanks 

Good enough ripple I guess

[seon123]

1 hour ago, Zic05 said:

So what makes the prime titanium and the prime ultra Seris “good enough” so that the don’t need inline capacitors.

 

Thanks 

Low enough ripple, yeah. 

[17030644]

8 hours ago, seon123 said:

Low enough ripple, yeah. 

I wonder if there is really a benefit of going as low as 10mV

[Rexper]

4 minutes ago, 17030644 said:

I wonder if there is really a benefit of going as low as 10mV

Better in reviews.

 

But reviews aren't always accurate to real life scenarios.

For example, some graphics cards can cause high ripple on the power supply. This was the case with the Seasonic Focus Plus and Asus 970 Strix, so they're replacing the cables with inline caps to improve ripple.

[17030644]

3 minutes ago, Rexper said:

Better in reviews.

 

But reviews aren't always accurate to real life scenarios.

For example, some graphics cards can cause high ripple on the power supply. This was the case with the Seasonic Focus Plus and Asus 970 Strix, so they're replacing the cables with inline caps to improve ripple.

i also thought of bragging rights

 

gpus that can cause high ripple on psu?

 

i thought that was an OCP/OPP problem