PSU Question

[SE14man]

I live in Australia and in the past 2 years have gone through about 8 PSU's... I htink this could quite possibly be down to the heat though im no expert!

The way i replace my PSU is to take my old one to a shop, get the shop worker to look at it and match it to another one identical.

Now the thing is.. obviously i might be buying crap quality ones which is why they die so much. I would like to buy a powerful long lasting PSU but then i have the fear of it being too powerful for the mainboard!

How do i know what my board is capable of handling for example the watts etc...

Please help me out here a little guys!

Thank you!

[jagabo]

A PSU can't be too powerful for the motherboard. It only supplies as much power as the motherboard needs. Putting a 500 watt PSU in a computer that only needs 250 watts is not a problem. If you've gone through 8 PSUs in two years in one computer there's clearly something wrong. 2 PSUs over 8 years would be more like it. Either the power supplies you are using are too cheaply made or they aren't powerful enough. Use a PSU calculator to verify how much PSU you need. Buy your PSU from a reputable manufacturer. Very cheap PSUs usually don't put out as much power as they claim and they fry when stressed.

What happens when you use cheap PSUs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/low-cost-psu-pc-power-supply,2862.html

[SE14man]

Thank you very much for the info there!

So are there particular brands i should go for?

Cheers

[aedipuss]

the highest quality psu's normally come from the seasonic, corsair, zalman, ocz, coolermaster, pc power & cooling, and maybe topower.

[jagabo]

Antec is OK. Beware that many manufacturers have premium and lesser products too.

[Nelson37]

Something is UnGodly wrong even for cheap crap PSUs.

After the first 2 or 3, why would you keep getting the same thing?

Get a good quality surge protector (APC) and check your building's electrical ground.

[fritzi93]

Yeah, you need a good surge protector.

The only thing that puzzles me is, why didn't something else besides 8 PSUs (!) ever get fried? The only time I hooked up a computer without surge protector (didn't look closely enough and used a power strip instead), a power surge eventually zapped the computer. It killed the mobo, GPU and CPU, IIRC. Luckily, not the hard drives or optical drives.

[redwudz]

My favorite PS failure was when white smoke and sparks shot out the back of the PS. Fortunately I was there or the apartment could have burned to the ground. It took out the MB, RAM, all cards and all drives except the floppy. No idea why that survived.

When I took the PS apart, the 120VAC lead had apparently came loose and shorted to one of the transformers and that put the AC line voltage onto the 12VDC rail. I've had two other cheap PSs die, but fortunately with no damage to the PCs.

If you have a PC worth $500 - $1000US, seems kind of ridiculous to trust a cheap PS with your investment.

If you keep up on sales, you can sometimes pick up a good name brand PS for a very reasonalble price.

[lamarrk]

Hate to say this, but it sounds like they took you to the cleaners with that power supply, again and again.
Why did they keep selling you the same one if it kept going bad that often?

As the others have stated, getting a bigger PSU is ok, as long as it will fit in your case and has the correct cables to power everything.
The list of PSU's from aedipuss is a great place to start.

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/psu_power_supplies/ is a good website for PSU reviews.

Good luck!

[SE14man]

Hey guys,

Well i have just bought the HX650 PSU. It has a few sockets on it for SATA & IDE cables.
I have made a picture below and was wondering if i have got the setup correct.
Basically i have one SATA cable in one socket powering 1 SATA HDD (Drive C , then another SATA cable in the socket next to that powering another SATA HDD (Data Drive F then another cable plugged in next to that which is powering IDE for the DVD Writer.
When i look in the BIOS the DVD Writer is at the top of the list being the Primary Master, is this ok?
Then the main Drive (C is also a master but is third master. Is this ok to have this setting or should i change things around?

Please also look at the image to tell me if i have done everything ok.

Thank you.

[jagabo]

It doesn't matter which connector the drives are powered by. It also doesn't matter what order the drives appear in the BIOS since you can change the boot order. Although I like to have them in order to make it easier to know which drive is which.

[jman98]

SE14man - Are you using a UPS? I ran my PCs at home for years without doing that and I've lost a decent number of PSUs too. I finally started using a UPS and I wish I had done it years ago. It's provided a high degree of stability for my 2 PCs because we have brownouts all the time in my neighborhood.