Newegg forced people to buy Gigabyte power supplies with catastrophic failure rates

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Feature image by Gamers NexusAn investigation into Gigabyte power supplies has found an unacceptable number of units failing, many explosively. What makes it all worse is that the same two model numbers known to be affected were part of Newegg’s forced regrouping program earlier this year. The two affected units are GP-P750GM and GP-P850GM. Because there is no way of knowing which units are faulty and which are not, ExtremeTech’s advice if you have either of these two power supplies is to take it out of service and contact Gigabyte and / or Newegg to arrange for a replacement, even if the unit has not yet failed.

Of all the components in your PC, the power supply is best placed to ruin your day en route to the Great Parts Bucket in the Sky. If your GPU fails, it will likely only impact your graphics card. RAM and storage failures can be more damaging, especially if corrupted data is written to a drive or file as part of the crash process, but you rarely hear of a RAM failure that cuts off power or a dead hard drive that destroys a processor. Most component failures are specific to themselves, with other losses being considered collateral damage.

This is not the case with power supplies. A failed power supply can and sometimes will kill other hardware. It can also set your system on fire in the process. I saw a PC ignite without warning. If I hadn’t looked over my shoulder at the weird sound of the floppy drive (burning), I would have had a very different day.

According to follow-up tests conducted by Gamers Nexus on these units, 5 out of 10 samples of 750W and 850W power supplies they tested failed explosively. This is backed up by a TechPowerUp review of the same 750W unit, which notes, “The primary switching FETs exploded with a hell of a bang. Their review and situation summary weighs in at 30 minutes, but we’ve incorporated it below:

Tech websites sometimes threw cheap Chinese power supply into power supply roundups to illustrate the danger of buying from various anonymous companies. This made the summaries more interesting to read – you could bet the units would fail at 25% load, or if they would hit 50-60% before melting and / or exploding. Keeping that kind of trash out of the DIY PC market isn’t just about convenience.

Newegg, frankly, hasn’t been a good partner for PC builders or gamers throughout the pandemic. We have no problem with the site’s decision to use a lottery to decide who can buy GPUs. this. But Newegg’s decision to force gamers to buy product packs or pay for his PC building services embittered me for a company I’ve done business with for over 20 years. Finding out that one of the mandatory products Newegg made people buy was responsible for enough complaints to trigger this kind of investigation is the icing on the cake. It’s also a great example of why a component supplier doesn’t have a business forcing people to buy. whatever.

Every gamer and PC builder who owns one of these power supplies deserves a refund and replacement, whether the power supplies are still broken or not. TechPowerUp Reviewer Notes:

Of course, I emailed Gigabyte with all of my findings and spoke to Power’s R&D supervisor, who informed me that they had verified five samples which had all survived their benchmark test. OPP. What left me with a negative impression was that they didn’t bother to ask for my sample to be returned to check what was wrong. With such a colossal failure, the respective brand usually immediately requests the return of the sample for further examination in order to find the source of the problem.

This is an unacceptable response from Gigabyte and indicative of poor quality control. Gamers Nexus shouldn’t have needed to conduct its own investigation into the problem in the first place; it is literally Gigabyte’s job. If you own one of these units and it has failed since December, rest assured that the issue has been reported to the company, who have decided not to investigate beyond testing five units offline. This was obviously insufficient and Gigabyte and Newegg share the responsibility for imposing on gamers reputedly bad power supplies.

We recommend that you choose your hardware suppliers and retailers with this in mind. Many companies sell these power supplies in addition to Newegg, presumably, but being forced to buy faulty hardware is not an acceptable situation for anyone. Additionally, we would no longer consider any Gigabyte power supplies for building a system until the company both rectified the situation and explained the mistakes it made that led to this situation in the first place.

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