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Brand Names Take On Generics In PSU Showdown
The Raindog writes "The power supply is perhaps the most overlooked element of a modern PC, and yet it's the one component that can irreparably damage the rest of a system. The market is littered with generic PSUs that are often much cheaper than name-brand alternatives, but can you trust them? The Tech Report aims to find out in its latest power supply round-up, which compares the performance, efficiency, and noise levels of a collection of reputable PSUs with some budget, no-name competition. As it turns out, any money you save on a generic PSU purchase will likely cost you more in the long run."
Plug in a Kill-A-Watt. $24.99 on Amazon. It'll tell you your line voltage (with or without load), power consumption, and energy usage for the duration it's plugged in. If nothing else, you can figure out where your electricity is going, how much energy your computer(s) is/are using, and how well your UPS is living up to its promises (unplug it and watch its performance).
I don't work for them or anything, it's just a good way to see what your UPS is up to and learn a little about your household energy usage.
Of course, if your problem really is your PSU rather than your UPS, all this unit does is narrow down the problem rather than solve it... Still, I consider it worth my $25.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Google may use cheap shit, but they can do so because their reliability comes in the form of redundancy. When you have a lot of systems, you can set them up so that no one failure has any real impact on your service. It's like a RAID-5 array. The disks themselves may not be that reliable but the overall array is because if one fails, you lose nothing you just replace it. Likewise a RAID-6 is more reliable since two can fail, and so on.
However, people at home don't have that luxury. I have one main computer. If it fails, I'm SOL until I get replacement parts. If a bad PSU takes out other components, I'm more screwed. So I have to go through reliability of the components themselves, get better components so they fail less often.
"You can hide a multitude of sins behind one of those "Warranty void if broken" paper seals. ;)"
Slashdot has one of those.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I've never underclocked a CPU, don't replace fans unless they break or get noisy and turn my computer off an average of two times a day. Never, ever has a computer broken even though I'm ignoring 3 of your rules.
The thing is my above observation means absolutely nothing as the sample is far to small to be of any statistical significance. I expect the same is true for your experience with PSUs. If someone has done testing on a reasonable scale, in monitored condition then it would be of real use to people buying 100s of units who want to minimise TCO.
I tend to buy reasonably good PSUs but mainly because I'm after energy efficiency (which is also why I power down twice a day).