[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 28 January 2012 - 05:31 AM, said:

How true. I remember with the emachines, I put the 9800GT card in there and had an Antec Basiq 500w PSU in it. I thought all was well and good. It was until things got a bit intense and that is when I realized that the PSU was a bit short, although it WAS 500w. At 18a on the +12v rail, it met the minimum requirements for the card. Point is, not all things are as they may look on paper. Probably one of the reasons I tend to lean to the overkill side. At least I am not over taxing my PSU.

What version of it are you talking about? I just checked and it has two 18A 12V rails. Did you have load-balancing problems?

[OVERSOUL]

I looked at the reviews and the Corsair CX430 seems to emit terrible screeching sound, SnyperTodd, the $16 CX430 sounds great, and since you've used a few how bad is the whining?
if its too loud id probly get one of these

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817371045
its still pretty cheap but looks reliable

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817153023
about the same price but with a rebate as well lowering the price to a bit above $30

[SnyperTodd]

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 12:16 PM, said:

coastie65, on 28 January 2012 - 05:31 AM, said:

How true. I remember with the emachines, I put the 9800GT card in there and had an Antec Basiq 500w PSU in it. I thought all was well and good. It was until things got a bit intense and that is when I realized that the PSU was a bit short, although it WAS 500w. At 18a on the +12v rail, it met the minimum requirements for the card. Point is, not all things are as they may look on paper. Probably one of the reasons I tend to lean to the overkill side. At least I am not over taxing my PSU.

What version of it are you talking about? I just checked and it has two 18A 12V rails. Did you have load-balancing problems?

That is one of the very few PSU's that actually has OCP on each rail, but the way it's distributed, there's no load balancing to be done. The motherboard & CPU get one rail, and everything else gets the other. That's one of the problems with low-wattage multi-rail PSUs.

OVERSOUL, on 28 January 2012 - 01:10 PM, said:

I looked at the reviews and the Corsair CX430 seems to emit terrible screeching sound, SnyperTodd, the $16 CX430 sounds great, and since you've used a few how bad is the whining?
if its too loud id probly get one of these

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817371045
its still pretty cheap but looks reliable

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817153023
about the same price but with a rebate as well lowering the price to a bit above $30

I've never heard any of them make any noise. You can't even hear the fan. One is in my server, and that machine is absolutely silent.

I've never messed with the Antec you linked to, but I have played with the Thermaltake T2R 430W, and I wasn't impressed. Like I said, the Corsair CX400s and CX430s that I have and have used for others are dead silent, and I've never heard anyone complain about them.

[waldojim]

OVERSOUL, on 28 January 2012 - 01:10 PM, said:

I looked at the reviews and the Corsair CX430 seems to emit terrible screeching sound, SnyperTodd, the $16 CX430 sounds great, and since you've used a few how bad is the whining?
if its too loud id probly get one of these

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817371045
its still pretty cheap but looks reliable

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817153023
about the same price but with a rebate as well lowering the price to a bit above $30

The second link is a definite no-no. Not for any reason you could easily spot either. That PSU is very 3.3/5V heavy, a requirement for older P4 / AMD Athlon XP era machines. With very little power available on the 12V rail, it will be worse than useless for todays builds.

The first one you listed falls under the "Basiq" line from Antec. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.

[LiveBrianD]

@synpertodd Hmm... 216W on each rail... Well, if the chipset draws 30W, and the CPU draws 125W and the GPU in the PCIe slot draws 75W, that's 230W. Then, there's 216W for the PCIe power connectors for the GPU, and the harddrives (pretty little). And how likely is it that a CPU would be put under full load in a game? I don't see how it's an issue.

Also, what problems did you have with the thermaltake?

@waldojim Keep in mind that I used a Antec Basiq 350W from about 2008 to late 2011, and never had an issue with it. That thing is a bit noisy though (I don't know how the newer ones are though). I'm not sure if the voltages are stable enough to overclock on, but otherwise, it's fine. In professional testing ripple wasn't too bad, and it was in fact able to provide 350W. (I'd like to see tomshardware or the like test an oem liteon psu, just to see how the ripple is and how much power it actually provides.) That machine didn't blow up.

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 28 January 2012 - 05:06 PM

[SnyperTodd]

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

@synpertodd Hmm... 216W on each rail... Well, if the chipset draws 30W, and the CPU draws 125W and the GPU in the PCIe slot draws 75W, that's 230W. Then, there's 216W for the PCIe power connectors for the GPU, and the harddrives (pretty little). And how likely is it that a CPU would be put under full load in a game? I don't see how it's an issue.

Also, what problems did you have with the thermaltake?

I don't know what you're asking about, LBD. I was just pointing out that there is no load balancing that can be done on that PSU- you get what you get and you like it. With bigger true multi-rail PSUs, you can balance the load and separate high-draw items from each other. Most multi-rail PSUs don't have the current limiters in place to separate the rails, they are actually one single rail in practice.

The TR2 was just a basic, low-end PSU. I did some experimenting a few years ago with small PSUs and big hardware, and that one was in a machine with a Foxconn X48 board with SLI 8800GTs (I know, it's not possible, but it is if you know what you're doing...). Anyway, it wouldn't run it reliably while a Corsair CX400 (older generation) and some other PSUs we played with had no problem with it. It wasn't the worst PSU we tried on that system, and Ultra 500W scoffed at it sometimes and other times would run the same benchmarks that it had shut down on. At least the Thermaltake was consistent in it's refusal.

[LiveBrianD]

SnyperTodd, on 28 January 2012 - 05:53 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

@synpertodd Hmm... 216W on each rail... Well, if the chipset draws 30W, and the CPU draws 125W and the GPU in the PCIe slot draws 75W, that's 230W. Then, there's 216W for the PCIe power connectors for the GPU, and the harddrives (pretty little). And how likely is it that a CPU would be put under full load in a game? I don't see how it's an issue.

Also, what problems did you have with the thermaltake?

I don't know what you're asking about, LBD. I was just pointing out that there is no load balancing that can be done on that PSU- you get what you get and you like it. With bigger true multi-rail PSUs, you can balance the load and separate high-draw items from each other. Most multi-rail PSUs don't have the current limiters in place to separate the rails, they are actually one single rail in practice.

The TR2 was just a basic, low-end PSU. I did some experimenting a few years ago with small PSUs and big hardware, and that one was in a machine with a Foxconn X48 board with SLI 8800GTs (I know, it's not possible, but it is if you know what you're doing...). Anyway, it wouldn't run it reliably while a Corsair CX400 (older generation) and some other PSUs we played with had no problem with it. It wasn't the worst PSU we tried on that system, and Ultra 500W scoffed at it sometimes and other times would run the same benchmarks that it had shut down on. At least the Thermaltake was consistent in it's refusal.

Oh whoops I misunderstood. Never mind.

I found a professional review of the Thermaltake Purepower 430W, one 12V 18A rail, and they found that it can provide 355W, but not 430W, and at that it had 83mV of ripple on the 12V line (my seasonic has about 12mV I think). If they drew 17A from the 12V rail, ripple jumped to 190mV and it skyrocketed to 680mV with 18A of load. Damn... and that has a 18A 12V rail? And the efficiency was below 80%. Basically, it sounds like it's a piece of junk.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

@synpertodd Hmm... 216W on each rail... Well, if the chipset draws 30W, and the CPU draws 125W and the GPU in the PCIe slot draws 75W, that's 230W. Then, there's 216W for the PCIe power connectors for the GPU, and the harddrives (pretty little). And how likely is it that a CPU would be put under full load in a game? I don't see how it's an issue.

Also, what problems did you have with the thermaltake?

@waldojim Keep in mind that I used a Antec Basiq 350W from about 2008 to late 2011, and never had an issue with it. That thing is a bit noisy though (I don't know how the newer ones are though). I'm not sure if the voltages are stable enough to overclock on, but otherwise, it's fine. In professional testing ripple wasn't too bad, and it was in fact able to provide 350W. (I'd like to see tomshardware or the like test an oem liteon psu, just to see how the ripple is and how much power it actually provides.) That machine didn't blow up.

A friend of mine had a Basiq 500 - and like Coastie, it couldn't get close to 500watts. He is nor running my old RaidMax 530 if that tells you anything! Even the RaidMax was a step up.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 06:09 PM, said:

Oh whoops I misunderstood. Never mind.

I found a professional review of the Thermaltake Purepower 430W, one 12V 18A rail, and they found that it can provide 355W, but not 430W, and at that it had 83mV of ripple on the 12V line (my seasonic has about 12mV I think). If they drew 17A from the 12V rail, ripple jumped to 190mV and it skyrocketed to 680mV with 18A of load. Damn... and that has a 18A 12V rail? And the efficiency was below 80%. Basically, it sounds like it's a piece of junk.

Isn't that what we said?

Oh and Snyper - I know all about 'convincing' chipsets to do what they didn't want to do. The MSI k9N Platinum boards ran the Nvidia NForce Ultra chipset - which does NOT support SLI. Though it did have an open ended 4x slot, and a 16x. With a pencil, you could hit a bridge on the chipset, and trick it into thinking it was an SLI chipset. The cards were hampered a bit by the connection, but it ran well enough at the time.

[SnyperTodd]

waldojim, on 28 January 2012 - 07:09 PM, said:

Oh and Snyper - I know all about 'convincing' chipsets to do what they didn't want to do. The MSI k9N Platinum boards ran the Nvidia NForce Ultra chipset - which does NOT support SLI. Though it did have an open ended 4x slot, and a 16x. With a pencil, you could hit a bridge on the chipset, and trick it into thinking it was an SLI chipset. The cards were hampered a bit by the connection, but it ran well enough at the time.

Nothing is impossible with a computer . It's a little more complicated on the X48, but the same principle. I've got benchmarks, validations, screenshots, and pictures showing SLI on my Foxconn BlackOps. I also have an SLI-modded DFI UT X48 board.

[LiveBrianD]

waldojim, on 28 January 2012 - 07:04 PM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

@synpertodd Hmm... 216W on each rail... Well, if the chipset draws 30W, and the CPU draws 125W and the GPU in the PCIe slot draws 75W, that's 230W. Then, there's 216W for the PCIe power connectors for the GPU, and the harddrives (pretty little). And how likely is it that a CPU would be put under full load in a game? I don't see how it's an issue.

Also, what problems did you have with the thermaltake?

@waldojim Keep in mind that I used a Antec Basiq 350W from about 2008 to late 2011, and never had an issue with it. That thing is a bit noisy though (I don't know how the newer ones are though). I'm not sure if the voltages are stable enough to overclock on, but otherwise, it's fine. In professional testing ripple wasn't too bad, and it was in fact able to provide 350W. (I'd like to see tomshardware or the like test an oem liteon psu, just to see how the ripple is and how much power it actually provides.) That machine didn't blow up.

A friend of mine had a Basiq 500 - and like Coastie, it couldn't get close to 500watts. He is nor running my old RaidMax 530 if that tells you anything! Even the RaidMax was a step up.

Uhh http://www.hardwares...ly-Review/792/7
Total: 489.9W, pass.

[SnyperTodd]

LiveBrianD, on 28 January 2012 - 08:47 PM, said:

waldojim, on 28 January 2012 - 07:04 PM, said:

A friend of mine had a Basiq 500 - and like Coastie, it couldn't get close to 500watts. He is nor running my old RaidMax 530 if that tells you anything! Even the RaidMax was a step up.

Uhh http://www.hardwares...ly-Review/792/7
Total: 489.9W, pass.

You've just heard from two different guys who have actually used this PSU and had it balk at their systems. Coastie, who has documented his issues with it well, and WJ, who also has mentioned it in passing before. While it's great that the supply can put out 490W, this is one of the rare cases that the manufacturer put OCP on the rails to effectively separate them. It's not how much power is being produced, it's how it's distributed that holds this PSU back. Like I've already tried to explain to you in this thread and in another, there is no load balancing to be done on a dual-rail PSU. It's set up to power the motherboard and CPU from one rail, and everything else from the other. If either rail is overloaded, the whole PSU shuts down. It's entirely possible that a system that runs fine on a single rail 500W supply won't run on certain dual-rail PSUs. The Raidmax 530W that WJ mentioned almost certainly doesn't have OCP on each rail, so even though it's a cheaper PSU, it doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of having multiple rails on a PSU too small to realistically support that scheme.

This post has been edited by SnyperTodd: 29 January 2012 - 07:10 AM

[waldojim]

The funny part is, that raid max was supposed to be a "quad rail", thouh i could never proove it.

Basically, quad rail by name only.

Edit: sorry that was the "dual rail"
http://www.raidmax.c...u/rx_530ss.html

This post has been edited by waldojim: 29 January 2012 - 09:20 AM

[LiveBrianD]

SnyperTodd, on 29 January 2012 - 07:08 AM, said:

You've just heard from two different guys who have actually used this PSU and had it balk at their systems. Coastie, who has documented his issues with it well, and WJ, who also has mentioned it in passing before. While it's great that the supply can put out 490W, this is one of the rare cases that the manufacturer put OCP on the rails to effectively separate them. It's not how much power is being produced, it's how it's distributed that holds this PSU back. Like I've already tried to explain to you in this thread and in another, there is no load balancing to be done on a dual-rail PSU. It's set up to power the motherboard and CPU from one rail, and everything else from the other. If either rail is overloaded, the whole PSU shuts down. It's entirely possible that a system that runs fine on a single rail 500W supply won't run on certain dual-rail PSUs. The Raidmax 530W that WJ mentioned almost certainly doesn't have OCP on each rail, so even though it's a cheaper PSU, it doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of having multiple rails on a PSU too small to realistically support that scheme.

Hmm... with my old GPU config (geforce 210, i5 750, 2 HDs, 2 ODDs), this http://extreme.outer...n.com/PSUEngine says I need 262W. That system ran just fine off the basiq, even with some gpu overclocking. That had a 10A and a 13A 12V rail I think (that's what the newegg listing says anyway).

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 29 January 2012 - 12:35 PM, said:

SnyperTodd, on 29 January 2012 - 07:08 AM, said:

You've just heard from two different guys who have actually used this PSU and had it balk at their systems. Coastie, who has documented his issues with it well, and WJ, who also has mentioned it in passing before. While it's great that the supply can put out 490W, this is one of the rare cases that the manufacturer put OCP on the rails to effectively separate them. It's not how much power is being produced, it's how it's distributed that holds this PSU back. Like I've already tried to explain to you in this thread and in another, there is no load balancing to be done on a dual-rail PSU. It's set up to power the motherboard and CPU from one rail, and everything else from the other. If either rail is overloaded, the whole PSU shuts down. It's entirely possible that a system that runs fine on a single rail 500W supply won't run on certain dual-rail PSUs. The Raidmax 530W that WJ mentioned almost certainly doesn't have OCP on each rail, so even though it's a cheaper PSU, it doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of having multiple rails on a PSU too small to realistically support that scheme.

Hmm... with my old GPU config (geforce 210, i5 750, 2 HDs, 2 ODDs), this http://extreme.outer...n.com/PSUEngine says I need 262W. That system ran just fine off the basiq, even with some gpu overclocking. That had a 10A and a 13A 12V rail I think (that's what the newegg listing says anyway).

I removed the Corsair 650TX from the eMachines and put the Antec Basiq 500w back in ( the Lite-On 500w PSU that came in the Gateway, didn't have enough molex connectors believe it or not ), before I gave it to my sister. It'll be alright for what she will be doing as she doesn't push things too hard anyway.

[SnyperTodd]

LiveBrianD, on 29 January 2012 - 12:35 PM, said:

Hmm... with my old GPU config (geforce 210, i5 750, 2 HDs, 2 ODDs), this http://extreme.outer...n.com/PSUEngine says I need 262W. That system ran just fine off the basiq, even with some gpu overclocking. That had a 10A and a 13A 12V rail I think (that's what the newegg listing says anyway).

Even with "some GPU overclocking", the GeForce 210 draws next to nothing. I'm not the least bit surprised that it ran on the Basiq 350. But we're talking about real video cards that actually draw some wattage, and like you've been told many times, the Basiq 500W just isn't up to the task. I don't even know what the argument is about, you're not going to change facts, nor are you going to get any of us more experienced guys to recommend the Basiq 500W to anyone running a system with a midrange or higher video card.

[waldojim]

Snyper nailed it. I would like to add though, the links to the wattage calculators that you are using, are very often loose guesses. They are also likely to over-estimate. Take those with a grain of salt. Take your machines - of various builds, and put them on a meter, see what they REALLY draw, and go from there. No, you won't have a perfect picture like that (as I sure as hell cannot prove how efficient my PSU is), but it will tell you very clearly the appropriate range for your machine. Even with 2x 5770's OC'd and an OC'd i5, I cannot, in all honesty, justify more than a 500W PSU. How can I justify telling a complete stranger to get a 500+ for a single card, and 35watt CPU?

Remember this testing?
http://forums.pcworl...er-consumption/

With a 95watt TDP i5, and a heavily OC'd 5770, I couldn't break 350W from the wall. It wasn't until I OC'd the CPU, that I finally hit 410 from the wall. With TWO cards, it finally got to 500 from the wall. It took two cards, and an OC'd CPU to justify a 500 watt power supply.... and I rock a 750. What is wrong with me?