 In this box is a PCI Express power filter card. It claims to smooth out the dirty power from bad components and improve the audio signals coming out of your PC. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna feed it a worst case scenario with a super cheap thousand watt power supply, along with a very coil whiny graphics card to see if it actually makes any appreciable difference to sound quality. My expectations, well, I wasn't born yesterday, so pretty low. Speaking of born yesterday though, I wrote a children's board book and we just got our first set of mostly final samples. So if you or anyone you know works for a bookseller and wants to have the ABCs of gaming on your shelves this holiday season for those little gamers who are still too young for a next gen console for Christmas, contact us at books at lttstore.com and we'll get the info you need to place your initial order. Before we can get into this card and what we expect, we have to talk about power and how it's converted from the mains AC power out of your wall to the DC power that your hardware works with. Most PCs today use what's called a switch mode or switching power supply. This is mostly because compared to a linear power supply, they are smaller, lighter and more efficient. A switching power supply can be as much as 80% smaller and can have efficiencies as high as 96% compared to the peak of around 60% for a linear power supply. But that doesn't mean that switching power supplies like this one don't have any downsides. And one of them is that they create more electrical noise. If you've ever turned on a speaker and heard a ss or bs when no audio is being played, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Quote unquote dirty power can rear its ugly head from the external supply, things like voltage spikes or lower unbalanced AC power like we have here in our building or even internally within the system after the conversion to DC from components like graphics cards or other chips. Now, aficionados of high-end audio have tried a huge variety of ways to mitigate this unwanted electrical noise with varying levels of success. One of the most common methods of noise suppression is power conditioning, where essentially you use a device that takes the less than desirable power that it's given then acts as a buffer, outputting a nice clean AC power signal to sensitive audio hardware farther down the line. If you watched our overview of the Abyss Diana headphones, you may remember this monster of an amp tower. This is the sort of thing that has had plenty of forethought given to power delivery. For example, where is it? Where is it? Oh, there it is. Oh. Actually, it fell pretty flat. It's probably fine. For example, for example, look at this plug here with its bi-directional noise containment technology. Thing is, most people don't have $15,000 to buy an amp stack to power their speakers. What if they just wanna use a PC? Well, that's where this, at least in theory, comes in. Meet the Elfidelity AXF107 Magician, a PCI express power purifying filter fresh out of Shenzhen, China. It sports seven different capacitors. Seven different capacitors. It sports seven different capacitors. And wouldn't you know it, they even threw in a little bit of RGB for good measure. Although I'm only gonna give them half points for that because to change the colors, you actually have to flip these little dip switches here with a pin. Now it claims to, and I quote here, prevent video card coil whine and improve overclocking as well as reduce noise floor for an ultimate PC audio build spec. That is quite the claim. Wow. You know, like if one $40 card can create ultimate PC audio spec, I will be shocked. Just as shocked as I was to hear that we've got a new shirt. Check it out. It's CPU pins. But if you look really close, actually if you look from far away, it's got an LTT logo in it. Up your geek street cred on lttstore.com today. Now to create the perfect storm of bad audio, we grabbed Anthony's GPU test bench and replaced the perfectly good Silverstone power supply with the sketchiest one we had in the entire warehouse. This $25, 1000 watt China special. You're actually gonna see this again, by the way, assuming it survives the day in our upcoming lemon PC build. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out. While we were at it, we tossed in this Sapphire Nitro Plus Radeon RX 590 special edition for maximum coil whininess. Even when this puppy's not doing anything. Hear that crackling, that ticking? Can you hear it? A little bit. Yeah, that's it. Well, it's not even doing anything, David. Oh yeah. All right, let's start with a baseline without our power filtering card in here. Preloaded on this machine, I've got a handful of lossless audio tracks ready to go and Grado's 420 edition headphones as our reference cans to start with. I really need to move to flack for all my stuff. Now what I'd really love to have is something with sort of quiet parts of the track. So let me poke around a little bit here because that's where you're gonna be able to hear that hiss or that higher noise floor. While I'm listening, I'm gonna go ahead and run SPECviewperf which is like a professional applications benchmark that loads up both our CPU and GPU to see if I hear any of that delightful buzzing through my headphones here. Can you hear that whine now that we've actually loaded it up? Yeah. I just, I can't make out any problem here. To be clear, these are not the most difficult headphones in the world to drive. So it's not a huge surprise to me that the onboard audio on this motherboard is able to drive them just fine. And I'm not saying that if you didn't have very high-end audiophile headphones, you might not need a better audio solution. It's just that that's not what we're testing for today. Today we just wanna know if this makes a difference in a setup that someone might normally actually use. So I don't know, maybe I'm gonna be blown away. Let's throw the power filter card in and see how we do here. Something to note guys that we didn't actually mention before is this can be installed either in a PCIe 1X slot or a 16X slot. So you can insert your placebo however you like. You just flip the bracket around and install it the other way. Where's my RGB at? Oh, it's set to white. Yeah, that's more work than I think it's worth to change. I actually wanna start with the simplest thing. Just the test tone. And it's fine. Fire up spec view perf, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one thing that we can determine like if it helps with the coil line out of the GPU. It's horrible. Let's listen to those same tracks again now. ["Stand Up"] Yep. Wait, Rick Astley made it onto this greatest hits of the 80s collection, but not with never gonna give you up. What even is that? I don't know. So Colin prepared this video and he wrote it as though there was no difference. And I wanted to try real hard to find a difference that he didn't detect, but unfortunately I couldn't. Not even in the coil line of the system. So the question then is what made Elfidelity think that this was going to work? Is there any scientific basis whatsoever for why putting a PCI express card into an entirely different slot would have any impact on the DC power quality of a graphics card that's over here in another slot or a sound card that's built right into the motherboard. You can actually see it down at the bottom there. Well, actually people have been putting capacitors and inductors and power lines to smooth out noisy signals for a long time now. LC filters are a perfect example of this principle that are commonly used in drones to improve video quality which can be degraded by the electrical noise caused by the motors and the ESCs, particularly when they're rapidly changing speed. So the principle is actually not stupid. The problem is that you're limited to just the things that this card can touch, meaning that there's no impact on the PCI express connectors that are going straight into your graphics card here. And it also ignores that your sound card, even an onboard one like this already has this kind of filtering built into it. The thing is, the youngsters out there might not remember this, but there was a time when onboard audio was so bad that a sound card was a pretty integral part of any decent rig. I can actually remember my first Sound Blaster like it was yesterday. It was an Audigy Z2 and it was night and day. The difference was enough to put tears in your eyes like listening to the same songs. It was huge. So I'm not poo-pooing the fundamental idea here. It's just that we're looking at yesterday's solution tomorrow. Because for the most part, those days are over and onboard audio is good enough for the vast majority of people. But wait Linus, you might say, what about coil wine? If it doesn't, oh, oh, that's funny. Well, whatever, we did this out of order. We already checked that it doesn't help with that. It's horrible. So let's just conclude with this. Given that we used the noisiest parts that we could find here in the studio and didn't perceive any difference, I wouldn't buy one of these. Instead, I would suggest either investing in a decent power filter or power bar for your entire system to eliminate ground loops and other noise, not to mention improve the longevity of your power supply. Or if that isn't in the cards, maybe go pick up a digital analog converter that sits outside of the PC itself, like one of these units from Fyio. By moving the signal processing out of the PC's case to an external DAC and amp, you're isolating it from the internal noise of your system. And yeah, yes, I know some of it can still come through USB, but there are options out there if you're that paranoid to further reduce that potential crosstalk. At the end of the day, bottom line is, a power filter isn't the first thing you should try when it comes to improving the quality of your sound. And if you're running such a bad motherboard that you're getting hissing and crackling from your headphones or speakers, I think your $40 would probably be better spent on a better motherboard that also improves the rest of your computing experience at the same time. Just like Squarespace can improve your website building experience. Do you need to create a beautiful website without the hassle? 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I'm never gonna give you up. I'm never gonna let you.