really, i mean, pick up a somewhat branded psu thats halfwaynice for 20 dollars and get two of them, and you have a nice dual psu setup. In my opinion, isint a dual psu setup better, having one psu for the cpu and ect, and another for the vga and hhds and other stuff like hdds.

i look at it this way, a team (or computer) is only as good as its weakest link.

better psu's have much cleaner power and they give the exact voltage to the components not 11.65 or what ever on the 12v line

they also can do more amps and can actually hit there wattage rating

and should the psu blow up or out, a good psu wont take down other components.

how the hell can u have cleaner power!!

power is power, no matter what you plug in,

i have a £11 400w tsunami psu, had it for about 2 years no a single problem here

if there is one thing that has been pounded into my head here at OCC< it is POWER SUPPLY MATTERS!

Never studied any kind of electronics before?
Well basically, the power that comes out of your wall socket is far from ideal. Even a cheap power supply needs to do alot with the input it gets to turn it into something usable. Generally more expensive power supplies will use higher quality components and go to greater lengths to calm and 'clean' the power, giving you more stability. They will also include more protection should something go wrong.

Still, the fact is that the average user will be able to get by on a cheaper supply perfectly well. You may even be able to overclock and be fine. Buying better quality just gives you piece of mind/some performance gains, just like any other product.

You get what you pay for.

Couldn't have said it any better myself.

Cheap things are not good and good things are not cheap!

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And Why are you Here?

Pow! There's your answer.

Doesn't it ever seem a bit stupid when you see someone buy an $800 FX chip, a $600 7800GTX video card, $500 on a killer WC setup, plus another $1000 in all the other drives and stuff.... only to buy a cheapo "600W" generic PSU for $40?

As far as "clean power", this concept sounds stupid if you don't know anything about it. "How can power be DIRTY?!" But the fact is, changing the power from high voltage AC like it is in the wall to low voltage DC like your CPU needs is a very complicated process. Any PSU will be able to do it, but they will have different margins of error. A generic PSU may dip as low as 3.1 on the 3.3 line. A quality one may dip no lower than 3.298. Maybe your computer will be fine with generic, maybe it won't.

As we all know, OCing is simply pushing your hardware until something fails, then backing off. If nothing ever failed, we'd all be running our Palaminos at 7.6ghz. Now normally, we would hope that our cpu is what's max'ed out, or maybe our ram or mainboard. But if you have a cheapo power supply, who's to say its instability isn't what's holding your OC back?

It's bad enough to ask a 2.0 to run 2.5.... the least you can do is give it what it needs.... proper power....

While there is a difference, i run dual 350W PSUs in my main rig, it runs perfectly stable right at the 12v mark on both PSUs, they costed me less than $25 for both of them and perform well. While it is more of a hastle i would rather have this and my 3000+ than another semi decent PSU and be stuck with a 2800+ skt754. That was my delima so this si what i did.

On the other hand, the 500w PSU in my LAN rig hold 12.13v with .01 fluctuaion under idle to full load condition no matter what i do with it (with the 68900 in it). Havent had a chance to try it in my main rig and see if it can keep it up while OCed. I persoanlly woudl feel better with a nicer PSU, but you can get buy with two decent quality PSUs, but you better keep an eye on them.