The Story Behind Cybenetics: Past, Present & Future

How Things Go So Far

If I told you that we had an easygoing all these years, I would be lying. We had a very difficult start, although large brands like Corsair, Seasonic, and SilverStone supported us from the first day. Going against a popular certification but deeply flawed scheme like 80 PLUS, which had the monopoly for so many years, wasn’t easy. We coped by offering way more and doing tons of free work during the first years of operation until all brands and manufacturers saw the true value of our work and our capabilities. Meanwhile, we kept investing in new equipment constantly while trying to find the best people to work for us. For more than five years, both me and Eri, my wife and co-founder of Cybenetics, didn’t get a dime from Cybenetics, so we had to keep our day jobs and work all around the clock to keep up. I remember at some point in my life, I was working at three IT sites, Cybenetics, and I also had my day job. Needless to say, there wasn’t any free time to even breathe!

In 2022, we made the huge step of moving the lab to Cyprus, our current place of operations. We hired more people whose CVs (and faces) can be checked on the corresponding Cybenetics page. We have a strong, competent team that focuses not only on PSUs but also on fan, chassis, and cooling testing. I am also keenly interested in measuring power consumption on power-hungry IT parts, GPUs, and CPUs. This is why I designed and implemented, with the help of Channel Well Technology, the Powenetics project, which is now the best tool for this job.

On August 7th, 2024, Corsair announced that it would stop using the 80 PLUS certification scheme in favor of Cybenetics. This is a massive deal for Cybenetics when you have one of the largest IT brands that fully trust you.

More than 60 brands and manufacturers use our ratings since users ask for them, including 1st Player, Asus, be quiet!, Corsair, Channel Well Technology, Cooler Master, Cougar, Enermax, FSP Technology, High Power, Inwin, Kinpower, Lian Li, Micronics, Montech, MSI, NZXT, OMEN (HP), Pichau Gaming, Raijintek, Seasonic, Sharkoon, Silverstone, Super Flower, Thermaltake, XPG, and many more.

Besides PSU certifications, Cybenetics also offers the following programs:

• DELTA (Chassis): Measures the chassis noise damping performance
• Phi Fan Performance Standard (Cooling Fans): Measures the performance of cooling fans
• Beta Testing: We fully evaluate a wide range of products before they go into mass production, comparing them with similar-spec products. We also find any possible issues that can affect performance and reliability. We already work with major brands to beta-test PSUs, cooling solutions, fans, and chassis. We have evaluated most branded (and not only) PSUs available today.

Future Goals

Our next big goal is to get the ISO 17025 and 17065 certifications, and we are working hard to achieve that. For those of you who don’t know what these ISO certifications mean, here are the plain explanations:

• ISO 17025: Enables laboratories to demonstrate that they operate competently and generate valid results, promoting confidence in their work. 80 Plus doesn’t posses this ISO.
• ISO 17065: Conformity assessment—Requirements for bodies certifying products, processes, and services. We will utilize it for our PSU, chassis, and fan certifications. The ISO 17065 is also required to enter the Energy Star program. Please note that the 80 Plus doesn’t have this ISO, but Energy Star set it as a requirement for Cybenetics.

Cybenetics already operates under the above ISO guidelines. Before applying for them, you must use them for a specified period and follow their requirements.

Cybenetics ultimate goal is to replace obsolete certification ratings while constantly improving its methodologies and adapting them to any upcoming requirements and needs. It is a constant struggle to keep up and keep on improving, but this is a challenge that the Cybenetics team is more than happy to accept.

Regarding the PSU’s overall performance, Cybenetics has developed a highly sophisticated algorithm over the years, considering all vital performance and protection features of a PSU. This algorithm is used in the Hardware Busters Best PSU article to classify all products based on their overall performance.

As a certification agency, Cybenetics doesn’t want to mix efficiency and noise with overall performance because these things might have some things in common but are also quite different. Although I have been a reviewer for over 24 years and an electronics engineer for over 30 years, I can still tell the difference between a certification body and a review site. Performance numbers and comparison graphs belong to the latter, while a certification body’s mission is to classify products in categories based on their performance in specified sections and award manufacturers for their efforts. If you use too many factors for a certification process, e.g., include performance numbers like ripple suppression or load regulation, you will end up with a complex rating system, which will scare brands and manufacturers and be useless in the end since nobody will want to adopt it. In Cybenetics, we already check and provide all performance numbers, which are included in the reports, but we only choose the relevant sections for our certifications. In case we notice that something is out of order, we don’t proceed with the certification process though, but we ask the manufacturer to fix the issues we spoted and provide new samples for evaluation.