Learned my lesson...the hard way

Mase

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 18, 2000
Messages
2,771
Having always overlooked power supplies, usung what was available, checking only watt ratings, etc...
I scoffed at the masses here suggesting the CoolMax 400w i had on the way was junk. How foolish of me :eek:
After blowing the resitor cap on my new 6800GT after 5 seconds of juice,
I felt raped by this shiney black POS CoolMax. You were all right. After reading many suggestions here,
I opted to get the OCZ 420, and I have a warm fuzzy feeling knowing it is on the way.
I got lucky and the replacement for the 6800GT is here tomorrow, the OCZ will not arrive until later this week.
I will squash the temptation to plug it into my underpowered AOpen 350...
Thank you all for edumacating me...and to all those not budgeting for a QUALITY PS...
dont be a moron like I :(
seeing is believing!
DSC01417.jpg
 
:rolleyes: hehe... if you can get rid of the dead one... i'd like it. :D just so i can say that i have one of those cards.

now how much you think a dead 6800 is worth? i might just pay it... seriously.
 
NewEgg sent me a new one after i RMA'd it, no questions asked!
I would pay $20 for one, wear it as a necklace for some real Bling Bling @ LAN Party
 
so the dead card is at newegg somewhere? dang.

i was thinking more in the $10 + shipping range... but all i want out of it is bragging rights!
 
starhawk said:
i was thinking more in the $10 + shipping range... but all i want out of it is bragging rights!


LMAO To brag about what?????? Look I got someone elses dead video card !!!!! WOW, That should bring the pussy flyin your way......What a NOOb..
 
no... to brag that i have a 6800GT :D but i don't say that it ain't one that works, see...
so they think it's cool!

of course... when they figure out that it's a crap card... but hey, it's all good.
 
hehe...
Yeah, you can put into a case with a cracked window and bad powerswitch, filled with other dead components etc. Then you can say you have this totally bad ass computer that isnt working, but damn, look at the parts list :p
 
ouch

well there is nothing as fervent as a convert from the school of hard knocks
welcome to the PSU Paranoids club ;)

that would be a little large for a keychain fob :p
but the magic smoke has definately escaped
 
who sez i'm gonna hang it off my keychain? i'll just hang it on my wall. :D computer parts make great decoration (as long as they aren't green...) when you're a geek.
 
so you bought an OCZ? :rolleyes:


seriously, I've heard good things about the power stream, but I've always heard bad things about OCZ in general, and I think the power streams are really cheesy looking so I would have went with Antec or PC Power & Cooling if your budget allowed it
 
if your Aopen PSU is a FSP350, it's actually manufacturered by Sparkle or Fortron and is a good unit.

i dunno if i'd use it to power a GT and whatever else you've got in your system though.
 
EnderW said:
so you bought an OCZ? :rolleyes:

You think the power streams look cheesy?
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/OCZ420/
Inside and outside is bling.
External pots, mirror finish, green fan actually matches my color scheme...
OCZ way back in the day was sworn off by myself too, back in like 2000
when they were selling junk out their basement and screwin cats over.
I think it is proven they have come a long way since then.
The warrranty on the OCZ is pretty sweet IMO as well.
I wont even consider an Antec after reading some threads here and seeing friends problems.
The PCP&C is just out of my budget period. I need to be able to afford things to plug into my PS :rolleyes:
 
felix88 said:
if your Aopen PSU is a FSP350, it's actually manufacturered by Sparkle or Fortron and is a good unit.

i dunno if i'd use it to power a GT and whatever else you've got in your system though.

It is 350GU which is also manufactured by Fortron i guess according to some
other poster. My main rig was rebooting alot with that PS and I had alot of draw on it with this setup (no GT).
Just have to be patient with my card until the OCZ arrives :(
 
EnderW said:
I've seen them, and I don't like all that shit, I prefer something more simple and black

but to each his own ;)

I knew this kid once who was mauled by a dog, now every dog he sees, HE SCREAMS!
Scared stiff of them...even little wimpy dogs...
That CoolMax that produced the pic above........
simple and black :eek:
I agreed with you until I got scared of dogs... :p
 
Mase said:
I knew this kid once who was mauled by a dog, now every dog he sees, HE SCREAMS!
Scared stiff of them...even little wimpy dogs...
That CoolMax that produced the pic above........
simple and black :eek:
I agreed with you until I got scared of dogs... :p

lol, when I said simple and black I was thinking more along the lines of this:

510Express.jpg


:D
 
EnderW said:
BS? And what are those graphs supposed to be showing?

nope the real deal
Electro-magnetic fields are radiated by any electronic device and can interfere with for instance data cables
they do obey the Inverse Square Law however
so twice the distance = one quarter of the field strength

your basic speaker next to the monitor fun :p

here is an interesting if not completely controlled experiment
http://www.anandtech.com/casecooling/showdoc.aspx?i=1841&p=24

This is kind of a unique test we have worked on for a while. One of the more important qualities of a power supply is to make sure it does not produce harmful interference to the components. Perhaps the most sensitive of these components is the memory (video card, RAM, and CPU cache), which is just millions of little transistors locked in an on or off position, held in place only by a delicate balance of electricity.

The driving theory behind ECC memory is that it corrects errors that occur in memory. Perhaps a transistor is faulty and flipped for the wrong reason, or a faint electrical signal pulled a transistor into the incorrect position. While researching this review and others, we have noticed the largest factor for incorrect memory blocks is faulty power supplies.

How it works:

We started off by modifying MemTest86. We bumped the delay between tests up to several hours, rather than seconds. MemTests86 works by writing various patterns into the memory. After our programmed delay of six hours, the program goes back over the memory and analyzes how many of those bits were flipped out of the original pattern. Both the memory and motherboard used passed the unmodified MemTest86 without any problems.

Not only is this a good measure of shielding on the PSU, but also a good measure of shielding on the motherboard and memory. However, we used the same motherboard and memory for the entire test. This way we assure that the small amount of interference coming off the motherboard is consistent with each power supply. Unfortunately, it took 6 hours to run this test and we ran it three times for each supply to assure accuracy. On the next page is a table showing the trial data.

PS, besides mines a EPS12V 510 AG (AGP Pro)
and its about halfway through its custom sleeving
far more custom than they offer
(sheilding and choking the harness with a custom rackmount length)
I work on it intermittently when I take the workstation offline
 
hmmm... idea: they say they modified memtest to delay 6hrs. and there were no errors. let's do the same thing... with both a cheap crap psu and a direct competitor to that model.

my prediction: both will work just as well for pure memory testing. all three will turn out perfect (or very near it) because emi from the psu really isn't that much of an issue. unless you have a fat bundle of power cables within about a cm of the mem sticks, you aren't gonna see much interference, and what you will see, even with said fat bundle stuffed smack in between two ram sticks, is gonna be very little. why? the magnetic field put out by one bit of wire in a computer is so weak, it's essentially not there. there just isn't that much energy there. that's why electromagnets are coils: to concentrate that energy.

conclusion: do the test... you will find that it's just a marketing ploy to charge you twice as much for a good psu.
 
How can a Titanium coating reduce EMI when the steel housing already blocks all of it?

Has anybody ever validated Anandtech's memory "interference" test results? And until someone does, why should anyone consider them invalid, especially in light of the shoddy way that they tested PSUs test (see the readers' comments, including the tester's admission that he was unqualified)?
 
well Topower employs Titanium while enermax employs copper sheilding
but basically they are Faraday Cages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

The idealized Faraday cage

Consider an idealized hollow electrical conductor such as an empty sphere or box.

If the outside of the cage is an idealized conductor, it will form an equipotential surface, that is to say, its surface will have the same electrical potential at every point. If there is no electrical charge inside the box, then by Gauss' law and the divergence theorem, there should be no electrostatic field inside the equipotential surface, regardless of what the field is outside the box.

Since the electrostatic field equations are linear, this means that even if there are charges in the box to generate a field, they will still not be affected by any fields outside the box.
[edit]

Real-world Faraday cages

Faraday cages are often put to a dual purpose: to block electric fields, as explained above, and to block electromagnetic radiation. The latter application is known as RF shielding.

Practical Faraday cages can be made of a conducting mesh instead of a solid conductor. However, this reduces the cage's effectiveness as an RF shield.

and obviously a PSU housing isnt a continuous shell
as far as conductors go Copper and Titanium are better conductors than cheap steel
http://www.amm.com/index2.htm?/ref/conduct.HTM
the real trick material in sheilding is mu-metal, which you see in foil sheilding tape
or sheets
http://digilander.libero.it/paeng/what_mu_metal.htm

as far as the anand test goes I find it suggestive, but not rigidly scientific
there is however a reason ECC RAM is around and the premise of the experiment is sound
however the PSU wouldnt be the only source, and something as small as a wire in a slightly different location alters the baseline, so it is flawed without a much much larger sampling and seeing how it takes so long to run each pass.....
 
I don't understand how copper or titanium improves the shielding because unlike steel they help much less against magnetic fields, and do they help against the electric field at the 100 KHz or lower base frequency that PSUs emit? Wouldn't it be better for manufacturers to install ferrite cores on the PSU cables, as they do with monitor and keyboard cables?
 
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