oldie but goodie workhorse

[exdeath]

So... I did some serious anti-hoarding spring cleaning the last couple weeks. Including breaking down my PCs and completely de-dusting them back to new condition screw by screw. After blowing a 10 lb dust bunny out of my power supply and radiator, I was thinking about power supplies and how 1000w+ is the norm these days.

One of my oldest machines now that I enjoy keeping around:

A8N-SLI
FX-55 @ 3 GHz
2.75v 2-2-2-5 1T PC3200
Raptor RAID0 array
Dual 6800 Ultra's in SLI @ 450/1200
Koolance Exos cooling the CPU and 6800s with Innovatek blocks

Despite SSDs, quad cores, etc, of today, this has always been one of my favorite builds ever, an icon of over the top builds in it's time. Now days top of the line power like that is cheap, abundant, easy, and practically disposable and game developers don't know what to do with it.

Machine was built what... 7, 8, 9 years ago...? I might have been one of the first in the country back then to get a A8N-SLI and not one but a pair of PCIe 6800 Ultras when they were barely rumors... yeah way back when... it was built to run Doom 3 and Farcry @ 1600x1200x100+ fps back when those games were the Crisis of their day.

What's the point of all this?

It's all been powered all this time by a 465w Enermax PSU, 20 pin even. Yes cooling system too powered off the PCs power supply with a molex. It was a carry over from a previous system even at the time, so it's even older than the rest of the components. Never once had a problem with it, still running strong to this day, even through hundreds of hours of WoW with the Exos screaming away at 40C+. I've had numerous other power supplies come and go in a variety of systems over the years since, and this one has outlasted them all despite being arguably overloaded for a decade.

Discuss.

 

[theAnimal]

despite being arguably overloaded for a decade.

Unless you left out something that consumes a lot of power, your PSU was more than enough.

 

[OS]

i did not have good luck with the old enermax PSU, i had a 431 watt and it struggled to run a very old dual celeron, the hard drives would randomly click on and off.

I thought maybe the rest of the system was bad so i upgraded to some sort of epox/athlon combo and guess what, turns out there are reports of "incompatibility" there also.

Eventually i replaced the enermax with some a free-after-rebate Ultra PSU and guess what, i still use that PSU today without problems.

 

[Blastman]

When I built my i3-530 last year, I used the Enermax 350W psu (20 pin) from my Celeron-T 1.1@1.54 system that was built in 2002. That Enermax was a very good power supply at that time. The only downside is that the dual fans are 90mm (intake) and 80mm (exhaust) so they're much noisier than the 120mm fans used in most psu's today. I'm going to replace it soon because I want something quieter and more efficient, but that old psu still runs great.