i know what you'er talking about, however, power consumption, changes
when applying loads, like playing games for long hours, a PSU gets hot,
and when hot produces less accurate load, and low quality PSU's fail in
this case, however its is recommended to get a PSU obove atleaste 500
Watts when using a highend card like 8800 GTS, or the 1950 xtx in there
requirments lists.
I think the smallest PS I have is 550 watts in an older socket A
machine with a 256 meg ATI Radeon card. The newer machines have 650
and 750 watt supplies. (ThermalTake, Antec, and Xclio).
I'm a firm believer in having good power supplies with enough capacity
to allow for expansion and upgrading. This approach has served me well
for the most part, but the new PCI/SLI motherboards as well as the
20+4 power connectors and the 4 or 8 pin CPU connectors required
upgrading the power supplies a couple of times any way. Also the move
to the new 140 mm single, quiet fan from the push-pull 90mm fans that
were loud was a "by choice" change.
a long time ago i hade a PC with a PSU that comes with the case, very
cheap!!, i installed a X 850 GT (was just released) , and the PC would
I used to purchase inexpensive cases and typically would replace the
cheap power supplies as they wouldn't run all the stuff I crammed in
there any way. I did have one old motherboard in an Aluminum case
with a 400 watt supply that worked quite well for several years, but
it slowly accumulated a HD here and there as well as more case fans.
One day it just up and quit. I discovered it would run fine without
the side fan, but wouldn't even start when I'd connect that little 90
mm fan which was probably drawing excess current. (it did work in a
different computer though) The temperatures were OK so I ran it
without the side fan even knowing I was close to the limit of the PS.
One day the PS failed. It took out almost everything except the HDs
and RAM. Motherboard and CPU were toast.
work but gets off while running a game for more the 1 hour or so, so i
checked the requirments of the card, and it says it needs a PSU with
350 watts or more, so i checked the PSU, and it was 400WATT's, but when
i checked about it i found that PSU units that are cheaper then 40$ and
has a unknown brand name, are most likely bad Units , since then, i
Not necessarily bad, but to say they are rated optimistically might be
an understatement. Also they may have peak limits on each rail that
are added together to get the PS rating rather than continuous rail
ratings. That's another thing I like about the big, name brand
supplies. To top it off you can purchase a name brand supply on-line
with much higher ratings for half the price of going to the local "big
box" stores.
Considering what's riding on them, power supplies are a poor place to
go "cheap".
always follow the reviews, now i always install atleast 550 PSU
ThermalTake or OCZ extreme gamer 600, on my gaming computers, for the
SLI - Xfire ones i go with the OCZ 700watts, and no one ever
complained!!, its good to keep an eye for the new PSU and how they
performe in articales and reviews....
Yup! I go over the reviews thoroughly, bearing in mind some of those
reviews may be a bit out in left field so to speak. (I do pay
attention to who wrote each)<
)
