hey all, yes as some of you may have guessed ive gone and blown up my power supply all because i didnt check my power rating before installing some new parts... the other day i purchased a new motherboard to fix up my PC along with a new SATA Drive and an Audigy Platinum EX sound card. Id always been ok with my 350W power supply so i never even concidered the fact that i might need more power, but i did. I got home installed all my new kit... put windows on the new hard drive and everything was fine. but then i tried to run a game... the second i did it the power went off on my PC. it turned it off then back on again and POP went my PSU. as it turns out id overloaded my PSU... it had been fine until the graphics card started drawing power, luckily this didnt damage any of my other hardware. anyway when i checked my reccomended PSU rating with all my new hardware i was hardly suprised... my minimum reccomended PSU was 372 Watts, 22 watts more than what i had. i was very lucky to have not caused any damge at all to any hardware... i now have a 500 watt power supply on the way and ive had to unplug a few of my drives to keep the wattage down on the spare 350 i had so as i dont overload it again. So always make sure that you check on your minimum PSU rating before installing new hardware otherwise you may be unlucky enough to have more than just your PSU go POP heres a link to a site with a usefull PSU calculator... http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/ always buy a PSU thats 100w more than you need, that way you have a very low chance of the PSU becoming overloaded and it covers for any future hardware you may purchase
We all know it, and I wasn't so lucky, I lost one hard disk, the data from two, a RAM chip and a floppy disk drive.
The graphics card is usually the main culprit for things like this. People slap in a new shiny card or CPU but don't upgrade their PSU at the same time. I used to have four hard drives attached at one time. I then realised it was costing a fortune on electricty as I have my PC running 24/7. Now I only use the one. Used that PSU calculator. At the mo mine requires 209 watts.
Well, new GPU caused me to up my 250W to a 600W one but it was faulty, bought a cheap 450W one in the meantime, which eventually broke at around the 410 mark.
had i been installing these parts for anyone else i probably would have checked the PSU first... but as its for myself it just slipped my mind, fortunately i was going to buy a new PSU anyway as mine is (well was) rather loud and has about 3 million unused cables dangling from it ;p the new 500 watt one is on its way in all its silent, see through lit up glory, lol
not an overly expensive one, just your run of the mill major brand generic crap lol, has everything i need though... http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=PS-X500SI
Good luck, I would NEVER buy a PSU like that, ever. It's much too cheap for it's power and features (bad) has no brand (also bad). A power supply like that should cost you £70 not £15. If you've already ordered it, OK, but I don't expect great things of it. Any PSU I've ever known anyone use that's been cheap has either been unstable, underpowered, or extremely dangerous. Not to concern you, but I'm worried.
im not worried about quite simply because all i need is any old power supply. i dont need to spend £80 on a PSU for a system thats only really meant for musical creation purposes. if i had an amazing gaming rig then id proabably spend more money on it but for christs sakes its a Socket A system... its hardly the most power demanding of computers. the PSU ive ordered is 500 watts, of which my system only requires 362 so ive got plenty of overhead.
Appreciably you won't be maxing it out, but that's beside the point, if it decides to go belly-up on you (bear in mind I had a 600W power supply just like that, costing me nearly double what you're paying, and that died on a system using about 308W) you could stand to lose ALL your data along with several system components. I'm not trying to make you worry, but again, I have to stress that it's not a choice I would make, I'm not making the same mistake again. 240GB was a lot to lose.
i got a psu like that with 3 cool lights which cost me the grand some of £10 and is also 500W has been running for the whole of 8 months now nearly non stop for my system 1, i think its good and if it ever dicied to go tits up i would just spend money and get a new system i kind of need an excuse to justify spending 1000-1500 to my mum lol.
I changed my PSU when I upgraded to a second 7800 card, my biggest fear was overloading my old HEC 500W PSU. I decided to go with the SLI version of the OCZ 600 Powerstream, this PSU has been rock solid for a while now. There aren't many people that have heard about HEC power supplys In the U.S. but they seem to be more popular overseas, 2 months after changing power supply I found out how good the HEC really was. Ohh Well, now I have two good power supplys. You can't go wrong with having a good backup PSU..
well the PSU is arriving today ill fit in my system after work... if it does blow up my PC i hope it takes out my processor so i actually have a good enough excuse to upgrade to 64 bit lol - i was going to upgrade when i got my new stuff but decided that since my processor still scores highly on benchmark testing (and is actually outperforming the equivilant 64 bit on render times for audio) i might aswell not bother.
Unitl 64-bit software becomes commonplace, that CPU will keep up with the Athlon64 3000+, so there's no reason to dump it just yet.
like i said that why i decided not to bother swapping out my system just yet... it still has some potential left i could go up to 2 gig memory (4 if i get my old board working) and get some 6 series graphics card i suppose. i probably wont do anything more to my system now. its running the best it ever has with my new mobo n sound card its just right for my home studio set up
Powersupply looks okay, 500watts, 2 fans. Basic but good rating. Good price! That's like what, $35 bucks Canadian? Good price. Lately I use only OCZ ModStream powersupplies because they are so kewl, and similar in price to everyone else's. They have a 520w one that is very popular but I normally use the 450w, it's fine for most with 'only' 1 vidcard, LoL :^) But very nice, $99 bucks with all the special modular cable management, 120mm fan etc. SypherTek you've got a good CPU eh buddy? Still all I need... Have you guys looked inside Powersupplies that are only a couple of years old? It's really bad in there... makes it kinda crazy to spend the really big $$ (or not crazy but just hard).
I bought a couple of PSUs similar to that one in the link from ebuyer for £10 each. http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=65700 I've had them for a year now. One of the LED fans has stopped working in one but the other is fine. Rock solid for a year.
The ebuyer one was the 600W one that died at 300W. It also made loud noises when attached to my 100W P3 system. After those experience, I just don't buy cheap PSUs.
well my new 500 watt seems ok, i tried doing exactly what i did when the last one blew and it carried on running fine, suppose time will tell whether its much good or not
