Spec me a PSU?

scoop

scoop

scoop

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Looking for a decent, quiet PSU what won't cost a fortune.......

The PC at home toasted itself over weekend, so I'm re-building with a P5K board, 1.8 Core 2 Duo, 4GB OCZ RAM and a Sapphire Radeon 3450. So far so good and within the limited budget available.......... Will also have 3 SATA HDDs and a DVD drive, so the machine is not going to be overly power hungry.

Was planning on something like the Enermax Noisetaker 370W but it's out of stock with no ETA. I gather the Hiper PSUs have some history so I'm left with the 350W Antec or the 380W EarthWatts, unless anyone can offer me a reasonable alternative?

TIA.
 
Hmmm...rather a lot over budget, alas (£40-ish inc. the VAT). Didn't Corsair PSUs get a bad name recently?
 
The Corsair VX series, (450w and 550w) are made by a different OEM than then VX series (520w and 620w) which is the reason that you might say they're getting a 'bad name'. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the VX series to be honest, just Corsair set the bar very high with the HX series.

The Earthwatts PSU's are actually pretty good. They're really efficient, which means not a lot of heat is produced, and therefore it doesn't need much cooling. The 80mm fan was actually silent for all the tests I did, but I did have the 500W version.
 
scoop said:
Hmmm...rather a lot over budget, alas (£40-ish inc. the VAT). Didn't Corsair PSUs get a bad name recently?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what gave you that impression since their entire line remains of a very high standard of quality (even the supposedly value VX units). Contrary to what the above poster said, the vx450w remains a Seasonic unit, it's the vx550w that is made by CWT and just check out this review for an assessment of how "bad" it is: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQyMCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

You might consider this Akasa anyway if you want to stick as close to £40 as you can: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-022-AK&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1082

The OCZ StealthXStream 500w and Corsair VX 450w would also both be good choices.
 
Thaks all, looks like it's a toss up betwen the Antec EarthWatt and the Akasa, then.....
 
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