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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.
i buy them at newegg. highly recommended.
I bought this power supply about a year ago. Not only is it as quiet as they tout, it's been a real work horse for me. I have a Lian-Li case, all drive bays filled (from time to time, not constanly ALL hooked up, but...), this thing keeps on running.
I highly recomend checking these folks out.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Over at "The PC Guide," there is a comprehensive look at issues related to the output power capacity and ratings of power supplies. I found it to be very informative... The link can be found here...
I recently bought a 430-watt Antec power supply, and it is a beast. It has two temperature-sensitive fans, gold plated connectors, and weighs about four or five times more than the one it was replacing. It was well worth the money, especially given the system it powers -- two CPUs, a GeForce 4 Ti, two optical drives, and a handful of modern hard disks.
On the plus side, my system is more stable, runs cooler, and is quieter than it was before. I greatly favor my premium power supply over the one that came with my case, and I strongly recommend anyone with a downed PSU to pay the extra dollar.
The #1 reason that I have seen for hardware failure was that the PS fan had stopped working and no one noticed. Most PC's (bought or built) are designed to pull air in the front of the machine because of the vaccuum created by the PS exhaust fan. No air flow = stagnant hot air = hot heatsinks = hot chips = CRASH. This is a very important component that is often overlooked.
Well I think this comes back to the fact that most people only use their machine to surf the web and read email. I think it is a fair guess that most of these people have onboard video or an otherwise anemic card, along with a 5400rpm HD, etc. Also, unlike business machines which are usually on 24 hours a day for their entire lifespans, I would say most home computers are not on as much and maybe more importantly- recieve less use as they get older and get relegated as a secondary machine in a house. I would say very few home machines get used for much more than word, websurfing and file sharing nowadays, which is a breeze for todays, yesterday's and even two years ago processors. This is a bit of a stretch, but I worked for a company that regularly made use of upgrades to extend the life of a machine... adding second disk drives, upgrading the processor, ram, etc... but of course never even thinking about upgrading the PS. I can not say how prevalent this is in other companies, but if it is, that could be another reason the PS's are overloaded and thus fail.
Yeah, the new ATX specs have power going to the board as long as the cord is in the wall. I was from the AT crowd too, I had actually been taught that a power supply plugged into a grounded socket was a good thing to leave when working inside the computer.
Luckly my surprise with the new ATX stuff wasn't as bad, I just had a machine power up when inserting a video card. No damage done.
To keep this a bit more on topic too, most good power supplies have a hard switch (as opposed to the soft one that the ATX power button triggers) on the back that will keep all current out of the motherboard.
I've been looking for a solid Power Supply review for a few days now. Thanks Tom.
That's very informative information. I always wanted to know that you were looking for a solid Power Supply review.
Geez, that's incredibly dishonest and disrespectful thing to do. Sure, you made sure that we knew it was from the article, but did you ever notice the copyright disclaimer at the bottom of their pages? They aren't making money if we read the article from another source.
I can almost understand this when a site is slashdotted, but that rarely happens to THG.
Any person that read the parent post and decided not to go to Tom's Hardware web site as a result, please do so anyways. They're surviving on advertising revenue.
I'm currently planning my second own-built PC, and I must echo the article's request for more (precise) electrical information from manufacturers. It is outrageous that the peak current at 12V drawn by a HDD, or the maximum current at 12V provided by a PSU, is missing from documents that call themselves 'technical specifications'.
This information is vital: it only takes a high-end PC with 3 modern HDDs (what you might use for RAID or for other multi-disk performance tricks to overload a 400W PSU. Not because it draws 400W during normal operation, but because on startup the disks draw too much current at 12V.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
I bought a case with a built-in 400-watt power supply that swamped a nearby AM radio with a buzzsaw noise. Replacing it got rid of the problem. Power supplies aren't that expensive, so save yourself some headaches and buy a good one.
They might not be lying, peak to peak for one cycle it might be able to output 500W (just before it explodes). Of course most respectable amp manufacturers will list the RMS watage number tested by an independant lab. I think it was funny one time when a friend was laughed at by some rice boys because he had a 100W amp, what those kids didn't realize was that this was a competition quality amp and that 100W was a true 100W RMS with a peak to peak measurement of well over 1000W!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Hrm.
.497 V to +5 V, 11.86 V to +12 V, -12.27 V to -12 V, and -5.04 V to -5 V.
My PSU is currently outputting 1.71 V to Core 0, 2.46 V to Core 1, 3.28 V to +3.3 V,
I can tell this all either in my BIOs or with some software I have called Motherboard Monitor or MBM for short.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Other devices do use floppy power connectors.
For instance, the head unit for my Creative SBLive 5.1 Platinum and various casemod toys like temperature monitors, fan speed indicators, etc.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
These are NOTORIOUS for their tendency to burn out at the drop of a hat. However, both Sparkle and PC Power And Cooling make 145W and 180W (the latter is AMD certified) power supplies that are direct replacements for the SFX-L power supply included in the system.
EMachines are not necessarily bad machines. They just have cheap-ass power supplies and also cheap-ass hard drives. Replacing both when the machine is brand-new is a must if you want one to last for more than a few months.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You know the nice brand new ATI Radeon 9700 that most people here lust over? I put one in a friend's machine recently... I was really glad for the second floppy power connector becuase then I didn't have to use the included Y cable and add more bulk inside the case. There's lots more devices that want a power connection like this, too. CF Readers, audio break out boxes, VU meters, LCD displays, etc. More connectors is generally a good thing, not a bad thing. You don't always have to use them, and cable ties are cheap.
see the fsp in the model number of the winners? fsp = fortron source power. fortron source power owns sparkle.
t =m anufactory&manufactory=1389&catalog=58&DEPA=1&sort by=14&order=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submi
click 'see picture' on the 300w/$27 unit and you'll see the EXACT SAME model number as the winner.
Seriously, besides saving your data you need a good UPS with AVR to feed your Power supply.
If you have power that sags or has other problems, even a high quality power supply is not going to save you.
I still can't believe there was ever a time when I didn't use a UPS at home. You really will add time to the life of your computer with a good UPS. Your PC will still become outdated, but at least it will be less likely to fail.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Well, unfortunately I can't find the original thread on arstechnica (their archive search is broken). However, here's basically what happened:
Back in September, THG posted this article with the title "Hot Contraband: P4 With 3.6 GHz" and the description "For this exclusive report, THG tested CPUs of the future, bringing you benchmarks for P4s in the 3.6 GHz, 3.33 GHz and 3.06 GHz variations."
In my mind, at least, this text implies that they managed to snag some unreleased P4 chips from Intel by one way or another and benchmarked them.
However, people on several websites noticed that the shots of the BIOS screen and the photo of the chip in question looked suspicious. They were actually from much slower chips, but with the numbers arranged so that they appeared to be from 3GHz+ CPUs. The shot of the CPU on the first page, for example, that has "PC3.3G0K" in the serial number was analyzed to show that the 3s were identical, and therefore at least one of them was copied over the original number in Photoshop.
Also, suspiciously, there was no testing of the hyperthreading that will be present in released P4s that are that fast.
Eventually, THG posted an acknowledgment of the issue, but it seems kind of hollow. For one thing, the shots they show of their super-unlocked P4 are not the same chip as on the first page. For another, they admit they're using current P4 technology. So basically what the article is about is not "Here is what the 3.6GHz P4s will be like," but "Here is what *today's* P4s are like if they are overclocked to 3.6GHz." None of the benchmarks apply to the real world unless you are going to use a liquid nitrogen (or however they managed such high clockspeeds) cooling system on a current P4 instead of waiting for the real 3.6GHz models with hyperthreading.
They *could* have been honest about it and called the article "THG overclocks a P4 to 3.6GHz!" like they've done in the past, but apparently that wasn't sensationalistic enough for them. If that weren't bad enough, they waited until a ton of people called them on their deception to admit what they'd done.
Ironically, this happened only a few weeks after Tom himself wrote an editorial about some unethical former writers for his site.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman