....And I owe it all to Badcaps! 
As you may or may not know, I, among many other review sites, reviewed the Youngyear built Ultra X-Connect power supply and gave it a thumbs up. This was over a year ago.
Months after these reviews went up, there were many reports of failures. Outside of UV light failures, I thought I was pretty immune to this and arrogantly assumed that the reports of failures floating about were exaggerated by third and fourth hand accounts.
Since then, Ultra has hired me to do some R&D and some light customer service (smooth over where tech support screws up.)
Recently, Ultra had a few people that bought some new/old X-Connect product from Microcenter and had experienced less than warm and fuzzy experiences.
Concerned with the high RMA rate and wanting to put the bad rap of the X-Connect behind them, the powers-that-be at Ultra had three units shipped from Microcenter to my door.
I loaded these up on the load tester and all three exhibited a .2V drop on the 12V rail with a mere 4A load increase (10A to 14A.) This was NOT the case with my own X-Connect reviewed a year prior. Furthermore, the crossload was much worse. When I dropped the 12V down to a mere 3A, the 12V rail shot up to 12.6V!
I then grabbed an X-Connect that was made by Wintech instead of Youngyear (you can tell the Wintechs because they don't have 115/230 switches. They're either 115V Only or 230V w/ APFC,) off the pile, threw it on the load tester and it was rock solid.
I then opened up the two and compared them with the photos from my 03/2005 review.
Now I'm not saying crappy capacitors is the reason why these power supplies suck. There's some differences that I notice like sloppy soldering on the modular interface, etc. But one thing I did notice that was in common between the good X-Connects and the crappy ones is that the good ones had Jee or Su'Scon capacitors....
....The X-Connects that performed miserably had Fuhjyyus!!!!
As you may or may not know, I, among many other review sites, reviewed the Youngyear built Ultra X-Connect power supply and gave it a thumbs up. This was over a year ago.
Months after these reviews went up, there were many reports of failures. Outside of UV light failures, I thought I was pretty immune to this and arrogantly assumed that the reports of failures floating about were exaggerated by third and fourth hand accounts.
Since then, Ultra has hired me to do some R&D and some light customer service (smooth over where tech support screws up.)
Recently, Ultra had a few people that bought some new/old X-Connect product from Microcenter and had experienced less than warm and fuzzy experiences.
Concerned with the high RMA rate and wanting to put the bad rap of the X-Connect behind them, the powers-that-be at Ultra had three units shipped from Microcenter to my door.
I loaded these up on the load tester and all three exhibited a .2V drop on the 12V rail with a mere 4A load increase (10A to 14A.) This was NOT the case with my own X-Connect reviewed a year prior. Furthermore, the crossload was much worse. When I dropped the 12V down to a mere 3A, the 12V rail shot up to 12.6V!
I then grabbed an X-Connect that was made by Wintech instead of Youngyear (you can tell the Wintechs because they don't have 115/230 switches. They're either 115V Only or 230V w/ APFC,) off the pile, threw it on the load tester and it was rock solid.
I then opened up the two and compared them with the photos from my 03/2005 review.
Now I'm not saying crappy capacitors is the reason why these power supplies suck. There's some differences that I notice like sloppy soldering on the modular interface, etc. But one thing I did notice that was in common between the good X-Connects and the crappy ones is that the good ones had Jee or Su'Scon capacitors....
....The X-Connects that performed miserably had Fuhjyyus!!!!
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