insufficient power effect

[imported_tjzhun]

I really want to know what's the effect if your PSU don't have enough power to support all of your components inside the CPU. And what's the difference between generic PSUs and branded -and expensive- ones?

Because despite the reviews that said GeForce(s) consumes a large amount of power, I never have any problems using those cheap-generic PSUs.....
And I'm wondering, which one is better, A branded 480Watt PSU or 2x 300Watt PSUs (One to support mainboard and one to support IDEs)

 

[Jeff7]

Really cheap PSU's can do an adequate job. But the key word there is "can." They likely won't though. Their outputs aren't as stable, and they may not be what they're supposed to be. Plus, they don't generally take an overload well. I had an L&C brand PSU die on me when I ran a Tbird at 1.4GHz on it (high power consumption). A resistor inside exploded it, and singed the circuit board. I was lucky too. Some cheap PSU's, when overloaded, may die catastrophically as well, but they might send a power surge through your motherboard or drives in the process. A good PSU will have the courtesy of simply shutting down when overloaded.

I'd say to just take the simple route, and get a name-brand 480W PSU. I use 430W Antec Truepowers in my systems, and they work just fine. One is currently powering an nForce2 system, with a Radeon 9500, and 5 hard drives, without breaking a sweat.

Think of it this way too - a computer eats electricity. Feed it crappy, moldy power, and it'll get sick. And when you complain to the cook about it (overload the PSU), he might poison the next dish, and kill everything.
Feed it gourmet, well filtered power, and it stands a much better chance of serving you for years to come.

 

[biostud]

Funny you should ask this a friend of mine had a p4 1.8Ghz + GF4 running on a no-name 230W PSU, it fried his videocard this week and probably did some damage to his pci card as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Funny, I had a friend kill his P4 system's mobo and vid card too, prolly PSU fault as well.

Another way to tell if you have an underpowered PSU, sometimes the system will only power-on a fraction of the time, and sometimes you have to hit the power button multiple times to start it, or "wait a while". I had a friend with a pre-built system from Tiger (don't ask, it was his first PC), and we upgraded to a V3 AGP card, and then the system would only power-on half of the time. Replaced the factory-stock 230W with a 250W (a much better-quality one too - a generic from CompUSA - you can imagine how cheap the factory one was), and things worked fine thereafter.

 

[Jeff7]

Unusual hard drive activity, such as occasional resets can also indicate an inadequate PSU, especially if the drive's SMART doesn't report any problems.

 

[imported_zapper]

I'm experiencing occasional system freezes, which usually (but not always) kills the monitor signal too.

I only have an Antec 300W PSU to run the system, which includes the power-hungry Athlon XP 2800 and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Windows has been reinstalled twice now, so it's not the problem (for once 🙂 ).

Might the problem be that the PSU can't handle spikes in power that the video card or CPU occasionally need for intensive operations? Underclocking the Radeon reduced the frequency of the freezes, which lends a bit of credence to this theory... and the room's at a cool 18 Celsius, so I doubt the system's overheating.

 

[Markfw]

Zapper, thats enought power for what you have, check drivers, memory, etc...

Antec 300watt = 500watt generic, but still better stability and stable voltage.....

 

[Duvie]

I had a crappy tigerpro that came with a case take out my sons 2100+ Tbred.....Luckily board survived as well as the hDD and Ram....

Flaky drives will restart randomly and frequently when they are going or oevr their limit. I have seen them freeze but mainly they restart.....

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Slowdown, reboots, shutdowns, trouble booting and componant damage can and will be caused by crappy psu's