A long time ago, someone had the idea to come up with a bulletproof PSU methodology, which proved to be good enough to lead to a full certification system, which is what Cybenetics utilizes now.
I started my review career in 2000 on a small Greek site, writing pieces, one of which provided information on how to overclock a GPU, among other things. I took a long break, about 8-9 years, to obtain my Bachelor’s and PhD degrees, and I went full speed again in 2009, writing for a Greek site before I moved to TechPowerUp. Although I enrolled in almost any IT category, I liked power supplies more because there were so few proper PSU reviewers back in the day. Besides vast knowledge of electronics, if you wanted to go deep into this subject, you also needed proper equipment, which cost a lot. This pushed me to build my own PSU load tester, which I called Faganas.
You can find Faganas’s whole story in this old thread. To make a long story short, at first, Faganas used switches to select the appropriate loads, and later, I upgraded it to relays, which I controlled through software I developed for this purpose. The software selected the appropriate resistors based on the chosen load, and it was smart enough to make combinations and use different resistor banks each time to stress them universally. The more you stress a resistor, the shorter its useful lifetime becomes. Soon enough, Faganas was replaced by electronic loads (by Array), and soon enough, I built my first Chroma ATE.
In 2015, in addition to TechPowerUp, I also started freelancing (AKA writing reviews) for Tom’s Hardware, which was one of the largest IT sites at the time. I wrote some of my best pieces there:
Από το thelab?!
Με πηγές πολλά χρόνια πίσω. Διάβαζα τότε τα ποστ (στο worklog?) και το θαύμαζα.
TheLab ναι και δεν μπορώ να θυμηθώ δυστυχώς το πρώτο site που έστειλα άρθρο το 2000.
Hi Aris and team,
As a PC building lover, cybenetics and hwbusters have been a great help for me and other people I have recommended to, especially on your PSU reviews and Fan Case reviews.
I just know this website and channel not long ago. Looking up for a proper, standardized, and comparable data sheet from a 3rd party is not something you can find easily for a PSUs. Since I already dive deep into this hwbusters and cybenetics I’ll try to spread the words to some other community I know.
Thank you!