True Stories: of Antec power supplies

Well....It all started a year ago when I was asked to build a prototype for my R&D group. On of the key parts of the prototype was that it needed a small, cheap, high amperage, DC power supply. A computer power supply fit the bill nicely. The spec was that it had to power two loads and provide 17 amps of currnet to each. Well an ANtec 550 is rated to 40 amps on its 5V line, so thats what I bought, thinking I had 6 amps of headroom. At the last minute though, the specs changed and they wanted to run the loads in series instead of parallel. THis means that for the same amperage my voltage would have to double...no problem, right? Just use the 12 volt line...wrong! That line was only rated for 24 amps...sigh. Well we had run out of options and the project director said "give it a try using twelve volts and see what the real limit is." I got that power supply up to 32 amps on the twelve volt rail!!! That's 33% greater than rated power! Suffice to say we have been running the power prototype now with no problems. I think this says a lot about Antec's QA. Hope someone finds this informative.

Bush/Cheney in '04....<font color=yellow>scamtron</font color=yellow>

You want TRUE stories?

PIII 700@933, 2 hard drives (one SCSI), GeForce2 GTS. 2 Antec True Power 250W power supplies. Neither would supply full voltage to all rails under the typical loads of this system. Newton 200W power supply pulled from Gateway 2000...Fine. Power Man 200W from Inwin case...Fine. A couple other system pull power supplies worked flawlessly, rated at 230W and 250W. Further testing showed if I reduced clock speed and core voltage to reduce load, removed the SCSI card and the power to the SCSI hard drive, everything worked fine with the Antecs.

Voltage fluctuation on BOTH Antecs as I raised the Un-SCSI'd system up to 933/1.70v became enormous. 3.3v line would fluctuate from 2.4v to 3.4v. Core voltage would fluctuate from 1.45v to 1.71v based solely upon system load. System instability was very high, load a game or anything else to stress the system, voltage drop followed by reboot. Several OEM power supplies did not have this problem.

After testing the supplies in other systems I found that the only ones they would not destabilize were old Pentium 1's. So I put them in some cheap Pentium 1 systems and get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Since then I've gotten another Antec 250W power supply. Same problems. I found a stripped down piece of crap with ultra-low power loads to put it in and sold it. Got a 300W Antec and tried it in my old system to replace a Power Man 250W unit, this time the system had a Celeron 1100@1466, 1.65v. Same problems, this power supply was BARELY strong enough to keep a Celeron 400 system with modem and onboard sound stable. So I put it in that system and sold it.

One nice thing about the Antecs is that they didn't fry from overload, they shut off. In all other respects, I found cheap Generic power supplies to be more stable! And the OEM pulls were better still! What does this say about Antec quality?

I don't want to hear about True Power series supplies, they cost nearly half the price of the systems I sell!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

Crashman has sold me on Fortron power supplies. The only thing that really scares me is that we take advice from <A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/html/crashman.html" target="_new">this guy.</A>

Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer. -- Homer Simpson.

Just do what he says and nobody will get hurt.

Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer. -- Homer Simpson.

I was waiting as well. To hear the full story, Priceless

Dazzle them with Brilliance, or Baffle them with BS!

HAHA, true, true. Threads like that usually bring Crashman running, don't they? I was surprised, myself.