Which PSU's have the best & fastest-acting overload protection (to prevent smoke & fire)?

There are two types of reviews: user reviews and professional reviews. I'd ask you with all my heart, never read user reviews for power supplies for any website. Those people are not professionals and they just give it 5 stars for working. Only use professional reviews, from electrical engineers. You'd find reviews on sites like Tomshardware, Kitguru, Jonnyguru, Techpowerup, HardOCP. And usually it's hard to understand what on earth the professionals are talking about without being educated on PSUs, so usually asking on forums is best.



Definitely. And the only way to know if the protections are working or how good they are is from professional reviews. To be honest, most power supplies usually lack a protection or their protections are just not as good as they should be. But life goes on anyway. But having working protections is something very important, and many power supplies that advertise they have certain protections really don't or they are implemented so very poorly.


If we are to generalize, yes. But there are always exceptions, it's not as simple as cheap = fire.


Only really crappy PSUs should catch fire. If a PSU is old it doesn't necessarily mean it's more likely yo catch fire. A power supply should not catch fire period. Though technically it can happen to even the best if there is some fault. I recommend buying new PSUs usually - there are good new PSUs on the market. I'd if the PC is over $300 get a new PSU.


Well this gets into some complexity. For one thing, remember protections are just one thing out of dozens when it comes to what makes a good or bad PSU. Protections should not be the only thing you look at. The "best" overload protection is debatable but good, working overload protection is one that shuts down the PSU before it damages the computer or burns. If it does that, it works.

There is also a difference in overpower protection and overcurrent protection, which many people group together sometimes as overload protection. Overpower protection is implemented on the primary side of the PSU and takes measurements of powre A ton of PSUs (even a lot from brands like Seasonic) advertise having overcurrent protection but really don't and only have overpower protection.

As for the "fastest" I have no idea. Nobody seems to measure that. It also depends on if you're talking about OCP or OPP. For overcurrent protection looking at the chip's PDF file can tell you the sampling rate.


Uhh that's hard to answer. But just keep in mind there are a ton of performance aspects of PSUs: ripple, voltage regulation, transient response, soldering quality, transient filter, capacitors, heat sinks, fan, the list goes on.



Take "wattage" very lightly. There's no actual quantifiable value that determines what wattage a PSU is, it's mostly marketing. Obviously you can't run like 4 Titan X on a 450W PSU but wattage doesn't tell you too much of anything.