Exploding PSU Warning: Corsair Lab Fun

Corasik said:
a lot of budget PSU's are only rated for max load for a fraction of a second (Peak load) rather than continuous load.
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This should be illegal... It's like selling a car saying it will do 300mph when in reality it will only do 300mph down an extremely steep hill...
 
I've experienced only a few minor fails with a PSU. My first instance was with a Vantec 420W years ago which would trip and reset the system as it was obvisouly not powerful enough to run my overclocked Athlon XP-M (would shut off at 2.4Ghz after a few minutes, with that being the ONLY overclocked component too).

After that I jumped to a PC Power and Cooling 510 (Non-deluxe, even though it was clearly advertised as a Deluxe on the now non-existent Savrow website, I never noticed until I had the new unit from RMA which then was a deluxe), which despite billowing smoke into my room managed to keep the system running. I was outside, and heard the fire alarm, and we didn't know what was causing the alarm to go off at first (as we didn't immediately jump to the conclusion the PC was on-fire, you jump to other things first, obviously!), so it was running a good few minutes, and it was paused in a game (not full load then, but still).
 
The only psu I've ever had explode on me was actually an Antec one, the one that came with the original Sonata case, years and years ago. One day I turned it on as usual, as I had done for several years already and there was a loud crack and an acrid smell and it killed my Abit NF-S V2.0 ....which was annoying as that was a great board. It was actually a secondary machine at the time though, so not heavily used and wasn't running a high end graphics card either (although it had in the past for about 2 years)

I've only ever bought 1 'cheap' psu myself, and that was a Jeantech 400w and that was to run a server machine which probably required less than half of that. I sold it on a few years ago as part of complete system to a friend, as far as I know it's still running, I'd have probably heard about it otherwise.

Enermax are my brand of choice though, they have served me well since about 2000-2001.
 
bledd. said:
Hyper = best modular cables, shame about the rest of the psu though :S
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are you talking about the ones on the old 580 as new hipers dont do modular, they must have lost the patent to Tagan.

as my BZ 600 has the exact same hiper 580 modulars, I have also had a Corsair HX 520 and those cables are so slim they work better in a HTPC then any others.
 
My experience with PSU's is this:

In several machines, I've just used a PSU supplied with the budget case, PSU and Case were about £40.

3 Machines, that either friends/family have now, or the remaining one I have left, are all still running on their original psu's, still running strong (All over 5 years old, one nearly 10 now!)

My previous build to my current one, is now on it's second. The first being a 450W Tagan quiet psu, it cost me around £120, four years ago, and it lasted just two/three years before developing a fault. (It has some power supply issues, the machine would struggle to post after a complete power off)

Whilst I understand that I got a fairly decent life out of the Tagan, I expected such a device (at such a price), to outlast it's much cheaper counter-parts.

So this time, I went in between, and got a low-mid end branded psu (OCUK Huntkey 500W).
 
Normally with higher end components they are being stressed by us much more however due to heavy o/c'ing of components. ANY electronic components that are stressed more than normal will fail more quickly.

To be honest another issue is one of cooling. We cool the rest of our machines more when we o/c etc, but we don't try to upgrade the cooling on the PSU.

Matthew
 
MacMiniBoy said:
are you talking about the ones on the old 580 as new hipers dont do modular, they must have lost the patent to Tagan..
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these ones
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Very entertaining !

As has been stated here, cheap PSUs are generally fine as long as they are lightly loaded. I've known a number of them to go for years and years. But I stopped buying cheap PSUs years ago.
 
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