A lesson perhaps, but I'd welcome comment from anyone with similar experience. I recently upped my cpu from a Duron 800 to TB1200. The home-built system (MSI m/b) has (had!) 2 HDD's, a CDRW and a DVD drive, plus Radeon, DV card, and S/blaster. The case is a £50 ($70?) with what I thought was a reasonable psu: 300w Pro-V MPT 301 PMC1010 (???). It claims to have "low noise temperature controller" so I was quite happy that when running intensive 3D the psu fan would speed up after a while. This week the machine froze and wouldn't reset or power-down, so I had to flip the mains sw on the psu off. Everything came back up normally, but the same thing happened the next day and when I turned the mains back on (at the psu) POW! momentary hdd activity then death. Every IDE device and the s/blaster is zapped (HDD's not recognised as being present, CDRW dead, DVD smoking). Presumably this psu (now behaving quite normally again) has sent out some horrendous surge at switch on. I know that the good psu's discussed here include overvoltage protection....don't they all? sob.....
You wouldn't put low-octane Arco gasoline in a Ferarri now would you? Same thing applies to power supplied to high-performance electronics. You won't find a cheap power supply in an expensive high-powered sound amplifier either. It's all about quality of input to get proper output!
Having spent some years repairing PC's in the workshop and in the field, I've never seen a PSU cause a surge that fried so many components, and then work again afterward.
Quite ironic really, you still have a working component but you'll never trust it to power a PC again!
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