Just been looking at this, and volume wise none of these new GaN chargers are significantly more dense than a 500w flex PSU. Perhaps more efficient? Less Heat?
The Silverstone 500w flex is 1010W/L
The SlimQ linked is 904W/L
The 'ThunderGo' (afaik, the smallest 200w 'GaN charger') is 1119W/L
Don't get me wrong, if/when GaN tech comes to Flex sized PSUs the extra 100w/less heat/higher efficiency will be great, but I don't think we are going to gain a huge amount in terms of size reduction over the best existing PSUs.
There are a few reasons for this, but one major one: the smaller the device, the larger a proportion of it will be casing and heatsink, as those can't be shrunk beyond certain points without compromising functionality, structural integrity, safety, etc. Of course these GaN chargers also have a lot of internal volume used for connectors compared to their overall size.
A few further points:
- A steel-enclosed PSU has much thinner walls than a plastic-enclosed charger, as steel is much stronger than plastic. The total volume of the case material is of course still larger, but proportional to the overall charger/PSU volume it's much less.
- An enclosed, passively cooled PSU needs to pretty much wrap itself in heatsinks as they have no direct airflow over the heatsinks, necessitating overprovisioning. Even a small fan massively changes the required heatsink size.
- The 500W Silverstone FlexATX uses soldered cables, minimizing internal volume used to get power out of the PSU
- Portable chargers have a higher requirement for idiot-proofing than a PSU made for internal use, meaning the safety requirements for the former are much stricter.
I still don't think we'll see massive changes in volume, but there's a decent chance of okay reductions. Remember, that 200W GaN charger is something like half the volume of the smallest non-GaN charger, so the volume reductions are real - you just have to compare to things that are comparable, and don't have a bunch of complicating factors throwing off the comparison. Any like-for-like comparison of different product categories like this will be misleading.
Screenshot 2022-06-23 at 16-14-50 Asus Made the World's First 300W GaN Charger for its Monster...png
