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The flip side to this, is that if you live in a warm climate and have to run airconditioners, you have to pay for the heat from the PC and the airconditioning costs.

I bought a standard computer case last time with a built-in 300w ps for about $30. I reused the case and power supply for my new C2D build and all was well until the ps got extremely hot and none of the games would run. I assumed my ps had packed it in as no air was coming out of the fan. Turns out the fan exhaust slots were completely covered in sludge. I just clean them off and now all is well! All the video games work now.

I just bought a 6800 ultra on e-bay ($89!) and I needed more juice so I bought a new computer case for $26 with a built-in 500w ps. I'm sure this is one of the cheaper designs, and maybe it doesn't have the fancy name, (L & C), but I hope it hangs in there for 3 years like my last case ps and still going strong!

Its funny you should mention tires... Thoose $200 bridgestone tires on Ford SUV's... You know, the Top of the line ones! How many people did those tires kill?

Mike

How about none. The faulty tires on Ford SUV's were Firestone branded tires. After the problems Firestone had with Ford, they fell on hard times and were acquired by Bridgestone.

Wrong, Firestone and Bridgestone Merged in 1990

Check the website

http://www.firestone100.com/history/clip9.html

The faulty for tires were in 2000. Sorry, dont mess with a car guy


Sorry, don't mess with a car guy? Do you mean one that doesn't know his A$$ from a hole in the ground on this issue?
"In March 1978, NHTSA announced publicly a formal investigation into defects of the Firestone 500. Firestone refused to cooperate. Firestone first asserted that only 400,000 tires produced at the Decatur plant were defective. But during the NHTSA investigation the NHTSA found that the tread separation defect was a design performance defect effecting all Firestone 500's. Firestone knew about this defect for at least three years prior and never told the NHTSA.

After forty one deaths, and after Firestone initially blamed consumers (improper repairs, rough use, or under-inflation), on Oct. 20, 1978, Firestone then recalled ten million tires."

However, you're confusing two separate issues with Ford. There is the Explorer roll over suits (which have nothing to do with tires) and the tread separation issue with Firestone tires. Keep in mind that prior to the tread problems; Firestone was the primary tire supplier to Ford


Apology accepted.

Man, you need stress relief quick. Go smoke some reefer and calm down.

Have a look at this site...
http://www.firestone-tire-recall.c [...] rview.html
then either apologise to Greenjelly or go to your room.

Sorry but that makes no sense to me. Why would anyone run, even an expensive power supply, above its rated wattage? Of course it'll cook if you stress it like that. It's like trying to pull a trailer full of rock up a mountain using a porche or a Dodge ram, of course it can't do it, it wasn't made to do it. Put that porche in its own arena the car will outperform the truck a hundred times over. At a given power level I'd take a quality powersupply over a cheapo one any time. I've had a pre-built system (the last one I ever bought) fry because of the Deer brand PS. Not only did that little POS cook itself it also took a motherboard and CPU with it. I've had to replace other generics due to instability and replaced them with the same wattage rated brand name ones and completely cleared up the problems I was experiencing. This post makes no sense whatsoever to me but then again I actually care about what I build and the quality of the products I buy.

To use the car analogy, a Ford and a Toyota may both be certified as safe for the road and both would be legal to drive but you're setting yourself up for a ton more problems with a ford.

As for anyone interested in the car thing, there is an interesting book called "The End of Detroit" written in 2003 about the downfall of the domestic auto industry. Its got a lot of really great info in it about the missteps of the NA industry and the innovations that the imports put in place to grow their reputations and marketshares while producing the best product out there.

Man, you need stress relief quick. Go smoke some reefer and calm down.

Have a look at this site...
http://www.firestone-tire-recall.c [...] rview.html
then either apologise to Greenjelly or go to your room.

The tires in question were Firestone branded tires, not Bridgestone.
Note that in the following summary of an Explorer roll over trial where tire types were introduced into evidence, there is NO reference to Bridgestone branded tires. Furthermore, the conclusion had nothing to do with tires.

"In early 2006, further support that the Explorer is unstable and can flip over during sudden driving maneuvers surfaced in an Explorer rollover trial in Mississippi. Ford's test results of replacement tires for the Explorer, introduced as evidence in the trial, indicated that the vehicle is unstable not only on Firestone tires but also on tires made by Goodyear, Michelin's Uniroyal, Continental and other manufacturers. Some of the failed tires had been approved by Ford as replacement brands."

I think we already said about 4 times firestone and bridgestone are the same company.... I dont care what they put as their label...

None of this tire crap matters....

The purpose of my original mention of this was to point out the fact that often the highest costing product ends up beign of the lowest quality... My point was ignored as well as my assertion and example of Toyota and Dr Deming.

Instead we have people making blanket statements.

We have people picking appart each others statements on totally irrelevat topics to discredit the other person.

If I did make a mistake on the name of the tire company, how does that discredit the other statements I made?

The audio industry is mostly a simple PSU industry. You see products that come out (BOSE) that are high cost and sound like crap. People buy this crap, and say WOW I got good stuff... But it all is way too expensive and provides very bad sound. The inside industry (sound publications) go to great lengths to review their products in very scientific settings. They compare items on a signal level as well as a objective level. Amplifiers and receivers go through rigorous and time hardend testing procedures that give very good details as to their results.

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Again and again we, and I, am guilty of the thought that the higher something costs more, that more we get...

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No one has even talked about the continual quality improvement manufacturing and product service policy and system management. Good companys produce better products for less... They are the companies I like, and are the same companies I try to find when I invest into the stock market...

Markets of scale reduce costs, and improves product quality... I keep pointing to Asus on this issue, because instead of producing a single solid product they have at least 2 different designs...

My Gigabyte Mobo with the Athlon 3200xp, was the low end motherboard of the product line. If you looked closely at this motherboard you would see empty spaces on the board where circuits and other components should go. Gigabyte was smart. They created an assembly line that produced 3 products... the cheaper products where removed earlier on the assembly line, while the more expensive ones continued down the line... They then used one BIOS for all of the MoBo's... when a defect in the bios code was found, they could fix it for all 3 MoBo's without as much problems with compatability (called code re-usability, another quality based process that computer programming project managers use to decrease defects and reduce cost).

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With all this said, I just would like to assert that my original title for this thread "Lots of money on PSU = Lost of wasted cash!" seems to be partially correct.

Until people start testing these products, and these tests are based on strong logic, we will not be able to come up with an answer to the questions we ask. Therefor we must base our opinions on assumptions. Marketing and assertions.

This sadens me greatly... I would hope that some day places like Toms Hardware Guide, Driversheaven and all other sites that provide product reviews could adopt a few extensive tests on 10+ PSU's.

I havent seen any commercial (magazine) that has done a tough examination of the products available. It is also sad because companies can produce bad products in shiny cases, that run quiet, and opperate like crap, yet get praise because their price, cost and promisses are high...

I think the term of selling products at high cost with great promises without providing value is a "Snake oil salesman"... this is a long running tradition in free marketplaces.

If we could hold these companies to a higher review process, we would assure a future of improved product reliabiltiy.

Just so I dont get crap, the shiny module based PSU's are becoming a must have for any PSU provider, and why shouldnt they look good...

I figure quality control is one of those little things we pay for.

I've had my share of cheap no-name psus, and I've had lots of weird errors with them, I even replaced a mobo because of it.
And guess what, it was just the PSU being bad from the start..

I'm not justifying a 100$ premium, more like 20$.
When you hit that magic border the PSUs has, for me, showed no particular improvement with cost.

Btw, I swear I could feel more bass from a cheap OFC thick cable than my old lamp cord...

I think a lot of people have misinterpreted Greenjelly's original post.

He didn't say that you should buy the cheapest PSU possible, just that you don't have to spend a fortune to get a well made power supply that will do the job.

He didn't say that cheap power supplies are just as good. He said you could buy cheap PSU's that did the job nearly as well as PSU's that cost a lot and that by spending lots more you don't get much for that extra money.

He mentioned that quiet PSU's were a special case.

It's a value for money thing. I'd rather spend the extra money on my cpu or gpu where I will notice the difference. If money wasn't an issue I'd buy a super quiet modular PSU to run my latest water cooled cpu/sli gpu speed monster instead of putting together duron 800's from scrap.

I wouldn't put a $20 PSU into my games machine but I would put it into one of my duron 800's. I'd happily put a well made $50 into my games machine.

I think his point is if the PSU manufacturers don't follow the strict quality assurance policies of the foreign automotive manufacturers, then all PSUs will eventually suffer the same fate as the firestone tires on ford explorers of the late 80s / early 90s and will not only fail, but they will explode and cause massive bodily harm and possibly death to PC users.

Remember johnnyguru? He used to have a PSU quality guide that is offline at the moment, and happned to find the text:

Hopefully it will help, at least we have some brands to associate with levels of quality at this point.

While the first statement is largely true, the second one strikes me as being somewhat hypocritical. You accuse people of making "blanket statements," then largely proceed to make one yourself by saying that high-end speakers sound like crap. This is your opinion - remember that sound quality is a purely subjective view (Well...maybe not the low end). Not all high end speakers sound like crap - unless you've listened to all of them and somehow have the right to judge for other people. Your foul opinion of Bose seems to largely originate from your disdain over their absurd prices - this makes it subjective, and so on...

I apologize; I understand how off-topic that was.

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Now here we are - this is your entire point, though I believe that arty communicated it better than you did.

Let me sum up greenjelly's post (At least what I got out of it):
Power Supplies and all other components should be/are subject to the "Law" of Diminishing Returns.

X-Bit Labs occasionally does a PSU "roundup" where they take 5 - 7 units and do stability testing, as well as checking to see if they match the manufacturer's printed standards. They haven't done one lately, though.

All my computers have had generic cases with generic power supplies. Havn't had a problem with any of them in terms of power except for my last PS (overworked--Athlon 64 with 3 hard drives, 2 DVD drives, media reader, Audigy drive and a slew of PCI cards died after 1 1\2 years of being on all the time). I replaced the dying one with a $35 (counting shipping) Thermatake 430W from Newegg

However, we did have to replace a few fans in the generic power supplies.

I'm not a big gamer, so that may be why I havn't had PS issues like others.

How long do fans typically last on name brand PSes? Do they last more than a generic PS fan?

krfan1

Generics usually have "sleeve" bearing type and I have seen them last between 2 ~ 5 years depending on their use (so if you only use your generic once a week for 10 mins to check email, it can last a *long* time).

the quality ones usually have ball bearing, sometimes dual, or some even have exotic fluid frictionless types that can arguably last forever. Recommended for 24x7 use.

I even had a customer request a Scythe Ninja over the plus version, because it was bundled with a 120mm sleeve bearing fan. His was for a pvr, wanted reliable 24x7 so he spent the bux on a silverstone fm121. Was it worth the addtiional cost? In the short term no, but when you spend extra cash for quality parts you are investing in the "reduced risk" of a premature failure - not eliminating it.

As Doolittle implies, quality is an attribute that one must purchase. You will never get better quality than you pay for and if your machine is not really that important, why waste money on quality. If on the other hand you want to minimize risk, you have to pay.

Thats just the way the world works. (at least in Capitalist systems, you could always try the old socialist "Everyone gets crap" means too)

I'm a fan of cheap PSUs, I spent £20 on the 600w psu in my current pc. The cheapest well known brand ones were at least £40 for the lower watt models. The PSU box had plenty of things on it like "energy efficient" and "silent" and that sort of thing, which is all I needed really. It is really quiet, it doesn't make a lot of heat, and it might or might not be efficient. I'm not wasting money on a brand name PSU, when you can get a cheap one that does the same job.

I went cheap on a PSU once....and only once, I learned my lesson about system stability the hard way. Also lost a CPU, and POwer regulator on the MoBo because of the crappy supply.

Its all about what is important to you. I gaurentee you that your cheapo power supply will never match a quality one in performance and reliability.