My Enermax 350W FMA that was bought in 2003 blew up 2 days ago.
Bought a new Enermax Noise Taker II 420W as a replacement.
Luckily all my hardware are still fine.
To find out who made that psu, get out our your magnifying glass, no not that one, the big one, and write down the Exxxxxx number on the label. That's a UL manufacturer registration number.
Then go here and type the Exxxxxx number in the File Number box. It will show you the actual manufacturer.
I bought a Rosewill 550W PSU off Newegg in february after my 2nd Antec TruePower died- no problems with it yet. Anyone else have any experience with Rosewill brand PSUs?
Just to add to the opinion of Antec, I agree that they aren't all bad. In particular, I have an Antec Phantom 350W unit which has been running well for over a year with a very low speed case fan pulling air from other components and supplying that to the area enclosing the PSU. It gets fairly warm (like it should, the case is the heatsink), but it doesn't get burning hot and has never tripped the overheat sensor.
Just thought I'd chip in
Oh, and I used to have one of those Q-Tec PSUs. It was crazy how you get 550W for £15, back in 2004. I'm glad I threw it in the bin, after what you guys are saying!
Unfortunately,
I think the Antec brand will have to be added to the list.
Last month,
Encountered a NEO model from one of their P150 chassis,
Failed to start up system completely.
Reboot issues.
They supposedly had it fixed in the first quarter of 2006,
Not!
Same system had no issues with a decent Fortron and even a cheap Thermaltake PSU unit.
I found it very educational. The overrated and underbuilt units were as expected, as was too much capacity on the +5V and too little on the +12V from old designs. But what was most interesting was the huge ripple in the psu with bad caps. That tells me I should react quickly if I see bulging caps in either a motherboard or psu before the ripple destroys other components.
There's no doubt that Antec is still a lot more reliable than generics. At work, I was replacing a few power supplies per month a few years ago, when they were all generics.
I started introducing Antec chassis with SmartPower PSU's and a mixture of TruePower and SmartPower PSU's to replace busted generics. Now more recently, EarthWatts PSU's come with all the newest systems. We'd easily have at least 70-80 systems now running on Antec power supplies of various sorts and in all that time, I've only had to RMA one that I can recall.
That said, one of my own SmartPower PSU's popped after only a few months of use. I got it RMA'd with no hitch. The other two older Antec systems of mine (one TruePower, one SmartPower) are still running ok though.
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