Expensive power supply neccesary???

[docwayug]

simple economics: its cheaper to buy a good psu to start with than to buy 3 cheap ones... and possibly risk having to replace other parts of your computer that the "cheaper" psu takes with it. quality over quantity!

 

[Zap]

You don't need an expensive power supply. You _DO_ need a _GOOD_ power supply. With a _GOOD_ power supply you don't need huge wattage. Take the power supplies in the Shuttle mini computers, for instance. They are only 200W, but are sufficient to power 3GHz CPUs with top-end video cards and dual hard drives - all on 200W.

There are some decent and relatively inexpensive 350W power supplies available. HEC (Heroichi) makes one under $50. Fortron makes one under $40. Either one will be much better quality than your typical el-cheapo-generico.

 

[Ymeister19]

ive got a coolmax i think its called 480 watt, i wouldnt call it generic but deffinately not widely used and my rails read as follows 12v=12.32v, 5v=4.838v, 3v=3.312v, im running 6 case fans, a 92mm tornado cpu fan, video card fan, 2 hard drives, cd burner, dvd rom, have all 6 pci slots filled, systems is overclocked to 182 fsb and there is no pci/agp lock my voltage is at 2.06 for vcore, and 2.75 for vdimm, if u ask me these rails arent too bad they are reasonably tight i think with the stress my system is under. I picked this PSU up for around 100$ i think its got 3 fans including rear LED light

 

[ponyo]

Lot of people have told me generic power supply is NO-NO. Shrugs. I've always used generic cheap power supplies that come with cheap < $50 cases. I've been using 300 watt no name powersupply with no name case for more than 2 years. Have 2 of these machines and both run 24/7. Both machines have DVD, CD burner, 2 hard drives, 2 case fans and agp video card. Both machines are overclocked. Never really had any stability problems.

I've also built several machines for friends and family using generic case w/ generic power supply. Never had any stability problems due to power supply. IMHO, 300 watts is plenty for most average users.

 

[Richdog]

Same here, mines a cheapo generic 300W which ive been using for over a year with quite a few components running off it, never had any issues with it whatsoever! That Q-Tec 550W does sound appealing too...

 

[Jhhnn]

Check out the Fortron units at Newegg. A 300w model will likely do the job nicely, 350w for some headroom. Nothing fancy, just good stuff, highly capable.

Don't let the published numbers fool you- there's absolutely no truth in advertising for psu's. Part of the reason that name brand units cost more is just the name, for sure, but there's more to it than that - they're better built, and actually a better value.

 

[akers]

Sometimes even a brand name device doesn't help. The 400 watt Antec power supply that came with my SX-1040 lasted a little under 18 months. I replaced it with a Raidmax.

 

[bootoo]

I think this also depends on what you're doing with your system. My husband had an allied which wouldn't handle his video editing at all; got strange bars on the screen till I gave him my enermax 420 and went with the foxconn 450 that came with my chieftec case.

Now I notice in overclock that my rails are OK but not as OK as with the enermax (more deviation from true readings according to aida 32) but it hasn't caused me a problem yet.

He's a big believer in buying cheap high wattage psu's but this time it bit him in the behind (and I paid the price!) - I heard good things about the psu on the xdreamer that svc sells (course from their reviews) - why not try it and check the rails and see?

 

[nebula]

Originally posted by: akers
Sometimes even a brand name device doesn't help. The 400 watt Antec power supply that came with my SX-1040 lasted a little under 18 months. I replaced it with a Raidmax.

Well hopefully good companies have some type of quality control policy in place, even so, unless they do 100% testing (which is not very practical for most companies), statistics will tell you that some bad/marginal units are going to go out. My point is you have a greater chance of getting a bad unit with a cheapo supply that probably didn't undergo quality control, hence one reason why they are cheaper!