Tom's Hardware Compares Power Supplies

Some guy wrote in to say "Tom's Hardware Guide takes a hard look at power supplies to find out if we are getting what we paid for. The results of the testing were very surprising." Very useful to anyone who has built their own machine from scratch or burned out a cheap power supply.

Comments

Fireworks

[RobPiano]

I had my computer for 3 years. Never once had a problem with it. My dad decided to install extra memory on it. It literally caught on fire.

I know you're thinking novice... But he's a software engineer, and has worked with a computer since the transitor moving days.

Lesson to be learned:
Buy cheap powersupplies, and give them to your eniemes as presents.

Rob(ert) #3

Re:Fireworks

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're thinking novice... But he's a software engineer


You learned the wrong lesson.

Lesson to be learned:
Never, Never, Never let a software engineer touch the hardware.

Re:Fireworks

[ngoy]

Since I am from the old school of computing technology (where off is actually off, none of this soft-on/off crap) it surprised me when I was putting in some dimms into a friend's HP that the RAM slots were powered for some reason (no, it was not in sleep mode). I pushed on the dimm and suddenly saw a bright point of light and little puff of smoke. I yanked the dimm out, only to find that one of the gold traces on the dim got so hot it melted the epoxy (or whatever holds it onto the pcb) that held it on and soldered itself to the dimm slot on the pc. So I ended up using a twice as large dimm in the other slot.

Moral of the story is unplug the power cable (we all do that don't we). Nothing gets your heart going like electricity! Like the time I was putting in a gable fan in my attic and cut a live wire with my T-Cutter's. THAT was a bigger spark, and burnt a nice big hole in the cutters. At least I got to exchange them at Home Depot

ngoy
(I'm still alive! Darwin ain't got nothin' on me!)

Re:Fireworks

[dildatron]

You are correct. I like to either lick the chassis and keep my tongue touching, or keep my nipple pressed against the chassis while I am installing/removing cards.

dead toms.

[lamp77]

Wow, we killed tomshardware, maybe his power supply went!

Marketing lessons from audio amps?

[Rob Parkhill]

It sounds as if power supply makers are taking a marketing lesson from audio amplifier companies... bigger is better, and no-one ever actually verifies those numbers.

My favorite was a $25 amp car audio amp I bought about 10 years ago. I kid you not, this thing is about 2x the size of a deck of cards, and is rated at 500W per channel. Ha ha ha ha! No, I didn't buy it for it's amazing power, I bought it because it was $25 and I needed a cheap amp for some tinkering!

Power error?

[mikers]

Inadequate and Deceptive Product Labeling:
Comparison of 21 Power Supplies

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Full Load and Overload - Power Supply Units Pushed to the Limits

Hehe...

Re:sparkle power supplies

[Stephen Maturin]

Whatever you say, fishbulb....

Re:Tom's Recommended/NOT-Recommended Power Supplie

[Tackhead]

> Since they're already quite sufficiently Slashdotted, I'd say we've given them more than enough page views.

And besides,

maybe if

Tom put more than

two or three lines

of text

on each page

and 25K of

banner ad HTML

his server

wouldn't get

slashdotted

so easily.

Re: Sparkle Power Supplies

[person-0.9a]

Kind of a bummer name they picked. The top three things things I do not want my Power Supply to do:

- Flame
- Smoke
- Sparkle