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Which if these offbrand PSUs is better?

A

aka1nas

Diamond Member
Hi all,
I am modding a case and making a heavily overclocked gaming rig and I have two PSUs I could put in it:

1)A 300 watt Powerman PSU thats been going strong for over 2 years

2)A 420watt turbolink PSU that came with the case I am currently modding.

I read in another thread that Deer makes the turbolink and is to avoided, is this true? For some reason I thought that powerman is the same as sparkle, but I honestly have no clue. My nice PSU, a 350 watt Antec, is in my server atm and should probably stay there as I have 4 hard drives in that beast. Which if these PSU's is prefferrable?
 
Deer makes Foxconn not Turbolink. Channel Well makes Turbolink.
Powerman is not that good to be better than 420 Turbolink, that is for one. Another thing I would not use Powerman 300W in Intel system, the 12V line is just too weak. It is OK for AMD system.
 
This is going in an AMD rig with the following specs:

AthlonXP 2400+
MSI KT4V mobo
1GB Crucial DDR
Radeon 9700np
2x40GB drives in RAID 0
3 optical drives

I also am adding a decent amount of fans in the case mod i'm doing(6 in all), so that should probablt be taken into account as well.
 
In the absence of reliable data, a way to tell relative quality of a PSU is by weight....the heavier PSU is generally the better one.
 
The sparkle is heavier, but not by much. I did some more research and it looks like the powerman is indeed a sparkle. Someone on ars insisted that the turbolink is made by deer even though it has CWT in the model, which would indicate its a channel well. I guess the better question is whether a decent 300 watt PSU can power the setup I mentioned including O/Cing.
 
Originally posted by: aka1nas
Hi all,
I am modding a case and making a heavily overclocked gaming rig and I have two PSUs I could put in it:

1)A 300 watt Powerman PSU thats been going strong for over 2 years

2)A 420watt turbolink PSU that came with the case I am currently modding.

I read in another thread that Deer makes the turbolink and is to avoided, is this true? For some reason I thought that powerman is the same as sparkle, but I honestly have no clue. My nice PSU, a 350 watt Antec, is in my server atm and should probably stay there as I have 4 hard drives in that beast. Which if these PSU's is prefferrable?
Click to expand...

The Powerman is the same as Sparkle, Fortron. All three are made by Fortron. All three are excellent PS's priced very reasonable. Powerman from my understanding is used as a oem ps by many companies
Stick with the powerman
Ed
 
I believe the 420w turbolink is made by channelwell. These particular p/s are sold by antec and rebranded.
its 420W TURBOLINK (MADE BY CHANNEL WELL,CWT-420ATX-12V.
Sparkle power supplies are pretty good for the $$$$$$$ to.

see:here
 
My PowerMan 235W ATX PSU came in a InWin A500 case I bought around 3-4 years ago. It is still running my AMD K6-2 500MHz strong 24/7!
 
Sigh, really bad news. First off, when i opened up my box with the Turbolink, I discovered it was actually a 400 watt raidmax(I coulda sworn the ad said turbolink when I ordered it.). Anyway I went ahead and used the powerman(Coincidentely also from my inwin case). Evidently all the crap I had in there was too much for the PSU and now my DVD-ROM and possibly my radeon 9700 appear to be fried. It was fine before I starting adding in all my PCI cards and plugging in my drives, and then it refused to start . The LEDs would flash for a split second and the fans would turn about a quarter turn, then nothing. I ended up picking up a 431watt enermax from frys and that let it start again. I also noticed that the powerman had a pretty anemic 9A max on the +12v rail. Now, the DVD-ROM gets no power and is not detected by the board and after I rebooted once or twice, all of the sudden I get no video. The tower can still be powered off via the front switch, so I think the mobo/cpu/RAM is still ok. Will swap out video cards and see if that helps tomorrow.
 
The Powerman should have two adjustible pots, one along the right side (with the fan facing you), and another almost in front of the fan. The one along the side adjusts the +12v rail output. If you find the +12v rail dipping too low, you can turn it clockwise until you reach the voltage you want. This pot will also raise the +5v rail, as it's built off of the +12v signal

I've found that the Powerman is underrated, as far as amperage goes. They don't seem to play the rating game. They state 9 amps, and they mean that it should never go below 9 amps. Other power supplies state nine amps at 25 C., and degrade rapidly from there.

I have run a 300 watt powerman, on a KT266a, 200 Mhz FSB, two 7200 RPM HDD, two CD-R/W, an OC'ed Ti-4200, and five 80 mm case fans. It ran for three months before I upgraded to a much larger unit (for futureproofing).
 
Originally posted by: aka1nas
Sigh, really bad news. First off, when i opened up my box with the Turbolink, I discovered it was actually a 400 watt raidmax(I coulda sworn the ad said turbolink when I ordered it.). Anyway I went ahead and used the powerman(Coincidentely also from my inwin case). Evidently all the crap I had in there was too much for the PSU and now my DVD-ROM and possibly my radeon 9700 appear to be fried. It was fine before I starting adding in all my PCI cards and plugging in my drives, and then it refused to start . The LEDs would flash for a split second and the fans would turn about a quarter turn, then nothing. I ended up picking up a 431watt enermax from frys and that let it start again. I also noticed that the powerman had a pretty anemic 9A max on the +12v rail. Now, the DVD-ROM gets no power and is not detected by the board and after I rebooted once or twice, all of the sudden I get no video. The tower can still be powered off via the front switch, so I think the mobo/cpu/RAM is still ok. Will swap out video cards and see if that helps tomorrow.
Click to expand...

The 430W Enermax is IMO one of the best PSU's you can buy out there. It has very tight voltage rails, and can run pretty much anything you throw at it. Also, it has a really powerful +12V rating, which helps a lot on P4 setups (most PSU's now 300W and above have good +3.3V and +5V rails, but not the greatest +12V. Enermax has great rails on all three).
 
Unfortunately, this powerman has no adjustable pots(It is over 2 years old). It's running ok in my linux box right now, at least.
 
Stripped the case down and realized that one of my floppy size power connectors on the Enermax is burned out on the power pin and the red wire is melted. This was the line that had the video card and the DVD-ROM that's dead. Guess i am having a bad PSU week.:disgust:
 
Sorry to hear of your misfortune, aka1nas. 🙁 I have 2 Powerman PSUs (well, one is in a comp I gave to my girlfriend) - both from InWin cases. The duallie in my sig is running a 300w Powerman and all the hardware in that box gets along just fine. It's about 4-5 years old, btw. The 235w or 250w from the A500 that my girlfriend is older still by 6-12 months, but only powers a P2-450, 2 hds, and 2 opticals.
 
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