Use of cheap PSU's

[decto]

So I may need an extra PSU or more for additional old gaming machines.

Assuming this is ball park 80W CPU and 150W GPU plus a few fans and a SATA SSD so 250W max. Usage likely to be 10-20hr/ month.

Seems to be very few mid tier PSU about with Corsair CX550 looking to be the go to budget option.

However there are a number of brands of cheaper 80+ or 80+ bronze supplies such as CiT, AeroCool, GameMax, CWT, Kolink etc. Perhaps there are even tiers within this budget tier but most of these claim 90%+ of rating at +12V so none of the old 50% of power at 3.3 & 5.0V.

Have you used or are you using a budget PSU?

I can get near 2 cheap, 'sufficient' PSU's with 400-500W @12V for the price of a CX550 so for what are likely near disposal PC's with a £50-£100 GPU and light usage its tempting.

So crowd sourcing your experience and recommendations of these 'integrator' class units specifically if there is a budget brand you've had a good experience with.

 

[mickyflinn]

Its a lottery when buying cheap cheap and prefer to spend extra getting something like the be quiet system power 10 which have been solid in budget builds.

Peace of mind is worth paying extra for.

 

[decto]

Its a lottery when buying cheap cheap and prefer to spend extra getting something like the be quiet system power 10 which have been solid in budget builds.

Peace of mind is worth paying extra for.

I discounted Be Quiet based on this and others Linky

Which got me thinking is there any real difference between BQ and less well known labels.

 

[mickyflinn]

I discounted Be Quiet based on this and others Linky

Which got me thinking is there any real difference between BQ and less well known labels.

It's always difficult at the lower end and easy to focus on the negative parts of the reviews.

There will be slight differences but who knows what as the bottom tier PSUs usually don't get reviewed.

Good luck whichever you decide.

 

[Gray2233]

CWT are a huge company and deliver top tier PSU's as the OEM for a lot of major brands, Corsair and MSI (among many others) use them for example.

Kolink I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, the fact OCUK insist on using them in their prebuilds is depressing. The number of people we've had on the forums with computer issues that ended up being due to Kolink is way higher than it should be. The Kolink Continuum isn't too bad, but for the price there's frankly better options with much longer warranties.

GameMax I also wouldn't go anywhere near.

Aerocool are a bit hit and miss, they do have one or two good units but they also have a lot of utter crap.

Regardless, all companies can and will release bad products at times. Seasonic is guilty of this and is often lauded as a premium PSU manufacturer, you need to take things on a case by case purchase.

 

[Tetras]

The best case with a low quality PSU is that the design is old and it doesn't offer much power, but it still has decent protections and reasonably good quality components.

I would never buy one, because it just seems like a false economy on a part that (if decent) you can re-use for maybe 15-20 years.

Which got me thinking is there any real difference between BQ and less well known labels.

There often isn't at the low-end, but a reputable manufacturer won't normally sell you a fire risk, or something that'll take your whole PC out when it pops. As mickyflinn said though, getting reviews for these units is very difficult and you often have to rely on ones with pictures of the innards and (e.g.) Chinese, German or Russian text.

Have you used or are you using a budget PSU?

I used a lot of budget PSUs when I started getting into computers because I didn't know any better and the custom PCs came with them. For the most part, they worked fine, but they often died early (within a few years) and were more likely to be noisy or have other stability issues.

 

[something daft already!!]

I bought a cheap PSU once. Only once. When it went bang while playing some COD, that was the only time I did. My current PSU has been going strong for almost 10 years.

 

[decto]

I've not had a PSU fail yet... though mostly had Corsair, Antec, Seasonic since I moved on from the bundled units in the beige towers of the early 90's.

Coming to the realisation that my pile of treasure (Old PC parts) might need a bit more investment than just a couple of used GPU's given the cost of a case, PSU and cooler especially as cooler prices seem to have doubled.
You begin to wonder at what point it's all just E-waste.

Still after a proper look I found a TX550M BNIB.... no idea where or when that came from.
I knew about the BNIB RM550x I picked up half price Black Friday in anticipation.

Also found my old HX620... looks clean and mostly free of dust and an old Huntkey Jumper 300W (80+ Gold) that's was actually well reviewed by Anandtech with 288W @ 12V so that may be enough for an I5/I7 'S' and GTX 1650.
The Antec Earthwatts 380 from the early 2000's might be a bit too much of a risk.

Otherwise there is a deal on MSI 550/650W which fall in the middle price wise and seem to be at least a known CWT platform.

For now.... I'll resist those ultra cheap PSU's, though part of me is curious to see how well they work at 40-50% rated capacity.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

Ends up costing you more

 

[Philtor]

You buy cheap…. You buy twice

 

[R-L-K]

In 2015 I was given and old pc which I converted into a jukebox for our workshop, the only 2 things I purchased for it were a touch screen monitor from an old cash register and a new Evo Labs 800W PSU, the PSU was £20.

It gets switched on at 8:30 every morning and switched off around 5:30, Monday to Saturday every week, not sure if that classes as heavy usage but it has media player playing all day and has 2 x 500gb disk drives.

Today it still works absolutely fine.

I also built a similar system for a relative but with an 550W Evo Labs PSU and that's still working too, although only used at weekends.

The PC I have at home has a Cooler Master 600W PSU in it, it's 4 years old and only used for a total of 6 hours per week - but the 3.3V part of it has gone faulty... and that was over £60.

Personally the way I see it is, if you don't overclock your system and you aren't looking to shove in 2 DVD drives, 4 hard drivers and as much memory as the motherboard can handle - cheap PSU's are fine and can do what they are supposed to do just as well as an expensive one.

 

[Gray2233]

In 2015 I was given and old pc which I converted into a jukebox for our workshop, the only 2 things I purchased for it were a touch screen monitor from an old cash register and a new Evo Labs 800W PSU, the PSU was £20.

It gets switched on at 8:30 every morning and switched off around 5:30, Monday to Saturday every week, not sure if that classes as heavy usage but it has media player playing all day and has 2 x 500gb disk drives.

Today it still works absolutely fine.

I also built a similar system for a relative but with an 550W Evo Labs PSU and that's still working too, although only used at weekends.

The PC I have at home has a Cooler Master 600W PSU in it, it's 4 years old and only used for a total of 6 hours per week - but the 3.3V part of it has gone faulty... and that was over £60.

Personally the way I see it is, if you don't overclock your system and you aren't looking to shove in 2 DVD drives, 4 hard drivers and as much memory as the motherboard can handle - cheap PSU's are fine and can do what they are supposed to do just as well as an expensive one.

Absolute nonsense. Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad, but this post seems to advocate them as the same thing as quality while suggesting dangerous trash. Nobody should risk their hardware on a crap PSU. It's effectively saying the person massively over specified wattage wise on the cheap for nothing more than basic O/S usage.

Returning member?

Anyone sane needs to ignore the above. That 800w PSU still works because literally nothing it's being used for requires more than 100w. The anecdotal narrative is dangerous, I hope that they have smoke alarms and good insurance. Good supplies have protections built into them so that even should they fail they do not risk your other components, or worse. That's absolutely not the case for hyper budget fire hazards such as £20 800w units.

Their only other post of my writing this is them confused as to why their system randomly shuts down.

 

[Malt_Vinegar]

@Gray2233 Nothing wrong with cheap PSUs within reason.
I mean, if you are buying from a random dodgy shop, all bets are off, but realistically anything sold in the UK by a reputable retailer will be "safe" to be sold and used.
Sure it might not have the best performance, but it will work and not burn your house down!

 

[Tetras]

I mean, if you are buying from a random dodgy shop, all bets are off, but realistically anything sold in the UK by a reputable retailer will be "safe" to be sold and used.
Sure it might not have the best performance, but it will work and not burn your house down!

If you buy from a known decent brand PSU it should be safe, but judging by the way this works with white goods (where even major high street retailers have sold fire hazards), I'm not sure if I'd be so confident!

 

[Grimley]

I very briefly sold pre-built PC's in the late 90's. Nothing but problems.
My manager and my self put this down to cheap and nasty PSU's installed. But no one was really making any decent ones back then. I dont think that there would have been if there were.
When I started building PC's myself a few years later I tried to buy a decent PSU, the market for these were small. I managed to buy my first Seasonic PSU and not really looked back apart from a couple of faulty Corsairs.
The advice the forum regulars and myself is always 'never skimp on the PSU' as you may be able to use it in future builds as I and others here have done.

 

[decto]

I think it's one of those... it depends. Do you want to spend £60 on a PSU on an old box for occasional use? Which is why I asked the question to see if there was any experience with these brands.

Total white label unknown brand.... non starter. Likely a 300W PSU @ 25C with any old wattage label.
Can happen to 'Budget Brand', The Aussie guy on YT who flips PC's shared examples of GameMax PSU's which were imported and labelled up before resale so can happen outside of the suppliers control even if the supplier was attempting to make a usable budget PSU.

Budget 'brand'... Consider for low end or old, low value, non critical hardware, redundant hardware. Assume 50% of rated capacity for continuous use and it's probably OK.
Most of these are rated at 500W+ anyway. Check that most of the wattage is available on +12V rail. Some case bundled PSU's are still 50-60% @ 12V.

Premium brands.... critical, high / medium value systems, high consumption (>250W continuous) etc.

 

[Tetras]

Budget 'brand'... Consider for low end or old, low value, non critical hardware, redundant hardware. Assume 50% of rated capacity for continuous use and it's probably OK.
Most of these are rated at 500W+ anyway. Check that most of the wattage is available on +12V rail. Some case bundled PSU's are still 50-60% @ 12V.

Premium brands.... critical, high / medium value systems, high consumption (>250W continuous) etc.

Personally, I prefer to use old good PSUs (i.e. hand me downs) rather than newer cheap PSUs, since the rig tends to age together anyway, but obviously that depends how many PCs you're running, since if you only have 1 that won't be viable option.

The level of usage does matter, since e.g. bad capacitors are more likely to die if they're hot, but things like lacking or having poor protections and using old designs are still applicable regardless of usage, so they're still more likely to degrade or kill your hardware and while it might matter less for a cheap PC, even just replacing a 1TB SSD will probably cost more than the PSU and graphics cards are fairly expensive even at the low-end.

 

[X x X]

CWT are a huge company and deliver top tier PSU's as the OEM for a lot of major brands, Corsair and MSI (among many others) use them for example.

Kolink I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, the fact OCUK insist on using them in their prebuilds is depressing. The number of people we've had on the forums with computer issues that ended up being due to Kolink is way higher than it should be. The Kolink Continuum isn't too bad, but for the price there's frankly better options with much longer warranties.

GameMax I also wouldn't go anywhere near.

Aerocool are a bit hit and miss, they do have one or two good units but they also have a lot of utter crap.

Regardless, all companies can and will release bad products at times. Seasonic is guilty of this and is often lauded as a premium PSU manufacturer, you need to take things on a case by case purchase.

i know right, how come they still use them
someone keeps advertising them on hotdealsuk as well and it looks like nobody there knows how bad they are

 

[Ormy1]

Buy a used PSU from a reputable manufacturer like corsair before buying from budget brands nobody has ever heard of. "Not burning your house down" is a pretty low bar, often the budget ones will provide dirty power which might shorten the life of PC components or fail to protect them properly from power surges.

 

[Ch3m1c4L]

Q-tec special, in a gold case with transparent fans! Was fine until I actually used it's rated wattage then it would spike and make the dvi out on a gpu all teal tinted. Other outputs were fine. 100% repeatable, stopped when changing the psu.

My first branded one also popped 2 weeks out of warranty, I've forgotten them name but was a big news thing as they all went to ****. 580w. Nothing else died.

Just had a fractal 600w platinum rated one kill itself wren I replugged it from/to the wall as I moved the pc and the cable came out while it was on. That was old af though, used in a server and then a mining rig and would have been running 50-95% capacity for it's life. Everything else in system was fine.

Cheap but branded is fine. Can be CWT or another normally OEM provider etc as they've been around for ages so the warranty is likely good. Just check it's specs, and if you're running anything above 100w on it, look at warranty length as a guide for the minimum lifespan of 90%+ of units.

Cheap unbranded/unknown brand, no point in the risk, even just testing if your current PSU is bad, the risk of them also killing other stuff when going pop is too high.