On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 17:35 +0000, Chris G wrote:
Yes, it was a 'generic' cheap power supply but it was the SATA drives that tipped it over the edge. The one that worked cost less than £10, hardly 'top notch'!
Any idea what the efficiency rating is on that ? The cheapest PSU's can drop as low as 60% or so (depending on load...SMPSU's don't have a linear efficiency curve so a single figure here can be meaningless)
Personally I never use PSU's quite that cheap in any machine I care about mostly because they tend to lack any overvolt clamping on the output.
This has been from past experience at a previous job where we had some very expensive artist workstations that had been built with cheap PSU's. Several failed taking every single major component of the machine (even the keyboard in one case) and on machines where the GFX card was £1800 and we had a 1GB of ram at a time when ram was £2/MB that wasn't very funny.
OK so your machine isn't as expensive as that but too many machines with cheap PSU's have passed through our workshops where the PSU has taken a Hard drive or Mainboard with it..I have yet to see this on recognised quality makes such as Antec/Coolermaster/Enermax/Seasonic etc...Ebuyer do an Arctic Power series of PSU's I have been very happy with at reasonable prices and I think they may publish some efficiency figures.