Bye bye power supply
It looks like the power supply in my desktop is on its last legs. It’s been struggling with the 5V line for a while. Normally I’d have to turn it on, leave it for a bit until it settled on 4.6V and then boot up, now it’s struggling to make 4.5V, and that means a lot of crashes. The old one was an Antec TruePower 380 that I got when the cheap that came with the case blew up a couple of years back. It’s done the job admirably, but as I’ve moved hardware from my Windows desktop to this one, it’s become just too much.
380W from a good quality power supply should be enough for anyone but at last count the hardware in this box is:
- 3 hard disks
- CD Writer
- DVD player
- Zip drive
- Floppy drive
- 5 fans
- 3 PCI cards + 1 AGP card
I tried unplugging various things last night but there was no change in the voltage output, so I suspect it’s permanently damaged. After some research I’ve decided to go for a Tagan TG480 U01. I considered some higher wattage PSUs but this thing can deliver 48A to a maximum load of 240W on the 5V line, that’s 18A more than most, so I figure that must be enough for whatever hardware is sucking up all the juice. The Antec claimed to supply 35A but the total power was shared amongst all lines. As a bonus the Tagan is quite and cheap so it’s a no-brainer. Let’s hope it does the trick.
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:43 pm
We’ve not really had much luck with Antec powersupplies in Brighton. Of the 8 Antec Sonata cases we have bought, 5 have had to have their powersupplies replaced. We have at least one Tagan PSU in Nic’s machine. Not sure what model it is. Ask me next time you’re in the office.