Okay... admittedly, power suppplies are something i am entirely clueless about. I've tried reading about them right now, but I'm much too tired to try and interpret this numerical jargon...okay, i found a few PS's and i was wondering which of them (if any) are good? Now, i know PS's are very important, but i do not have a lot to blow on mine, so im trying to spend conservatively. Right now ihave a generic 350W, and i think it is giving me problems. My +12v rails are around 12.6, and from what i hear this can be problematic? im at work right now so i cant check the rest of my rails, but most of them are off by around .2-.5 So i found some Here , and i was wondering if this one is any good (and no, im not interested in the crap leds, its by raidmax which is a name I recognized, so i thought it might be good) Here is another. (in my Sig) you can see that I have 1 HD, 1 DVD (soon to add 1 cdrw), an OC'd proc, 1 sound card, 1 video card, 1 video capture card, 3 case fans, 1 powerful HSF, 1 cold cathode light, 5.1 surround speaker set. Take all this into consideration if you have any recommendations.

This one looks a little bit scheisty, but it has 600W!!!

Here is the last one...this one has 3 fans, so I would have to mod my case to do this one (maybe not that bad of a thing )


Okay, there you have it. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Out of these which is best, or if you have another one in mind that is beter please post a link to it or suggest it. Please keep in mind though, that i want to spend like $40-45 MAX on this. It does not need to be overkill, just power what I have now (with a little headroom for the future)



Thanks for putting up with me
HB

Hey i Have a powertek 600w psu. At my old work the network administrator ordered like 50 of them for servers and stuff and gave me one. I got the blue one in my machine with two fans. Hasn't given me problems yet!
6 months and counting. Best $30 investment of my life.

really???? they have the blue 600w one on ebay..its going for pretty cheap..its not too bad tho? u getting good rails with it?

its given me no problems whatsoever. And the network admin at my old runs a bunch of them on the xeon servers at work and have not fried or failed yet.
Heres a pic of it in my machine

cool. Thanks, ill go with that one.

yea as far as my rails. I don't oc much off my system, but stable and rock solid. Numbers match up with the rails and if it is off by only 1 100th and not a 10th.

The antec true power series are the best power supplies for the money. i wouldnt buy anything else.

im sure they are but ehh, too much money....im just looking for an improvement over the one that came with my $58 case.

replacing a cheap PSU with a cheap PSU..i love the logic. And wattage has nothing to do with your rails. A 600W PSU won't necessarily fix your problem if the rails on it are garbage too. I would grab an antec truepower 430 for 70$

yah its not an upgrade if you just replace it with crap, if $70 is too much get the next one down. Most of the time a quality psu with less wattage will perfrom better than one with alot more.

Okay well the powertek 600w works excellent on my machine and the 20 other SERVERS at Life Alert (where i used to work, Remember the commercial "Help I've fallen and I can't get up"), so i wouldn't say its crap. Sometimes when stuff is cheaper in price then yes its crap, not this one, and Im being frank with you guys, its not a bad PSU at all.

that's why Im going to get it...and if it sucks, ill hunt you down and have your head jk

Well, you can get it if you like, but I am willing to bet it comes nowhere near 600w. The nice thing about getting a quality PSU is that it not only has the wattage it is rated at (sometimes more), but the rails are guaranteed to be rock solid.

Go ahead and get that if you like, but remember you get what you pay for. If you do get it, please tell us what the rails are like. I'm curious.

ill just show you them now

well i think if you loaded both rails up, sure, its not goin to give you 600watts. Thats where antecs true power dedicated output circuits for the 12v and 5v lines come into play. While your psu probably has a combined output limit of probably half of what it says. But if your not goin to load up the psu with lights and lots of fans then it should work fine for you.

I dont think I could run my cpu at 300watts let alone my whole computer and devices in my sig???

I agree. I only have a generic 350watt that has been running in my comp for about a month, and it powers everything listed in my sig 24/7. Now, stability may become an issue later, that's why im getting a new PSU, but this one obviously has mroe than (175w) its rated wattage, or my comp wouldn't even boot up!!!

I learned my lesson the hard way when I tried to power up all the stuff in my case with a 300w Macron that I took out of my previous case (add one cathode and 4 fans to the sig and minus the processor to a 2100+ Palomino). A push on the power button and *ZAP*, nice orange light out the black and a bad smell for a few hours. Lucklily I didn't wreck any of the hardware components.

Man that sucks

I'd go for the 600watts when buying a PSU 'this' is all you have to look for
And for the price,if it were not for shipping costs I'D buy one.Even if it gives you 500w it's a 300w price
Over-Current/ Over-Voltage Protection
Short Circuit Protection on all outputs