On Monday 24 May 2004 08:05, Craig wrote:
Be aware of those PSU. Some of them are so horrid which most of the time get blown up (with smoke pouring out the back) or die the next day for no reasons.
Good advice, Reminds me of an incident at my previous post of employment.
We had artists sitting on (what were then) extremely high specification machines. Twin PIII 500, 512MB, twin SCSI 9GB drives and £1700 worth of 3DLabs graphics card. All in all these workstations ran to about £4000 plus.
Strange then (I hasten to add a decision made before my time) that the PSU spec on these machines was a standard (and very cheap and nasty) desktop PSU, it struggled to run such a configuration at the best of times, once I had discovered this flaw we set about replacing them as quickly as we could....unfortunately not quick enough as one day a rather bemused user came to me to say that upon boot his machine had emmited black smoke from the rear fan.
Further investigation showed that before committing suicide the PSU had managed to spike one of the rails, to such a point that almost everything on that machine was toast, MainBoard, RAM, Processors, that expensive 3D card, Drives EVEN THE KEYBOARD ! Chips had actually blown their tops.
Decent PSU's have effective crowbar overvoltage protection, and should never do this. Cheap ones can. In this case for the want of a few quid spent on a better powersupply a £4000 machine was a total loss and we had an (equally expensive) artist twiddling his thumbs for a day while I built him a new machine.
Not so relevant to building a cheap machine out of scrap parts, but I thought I'd share neverless.