About six years ago, I bought a massive Antec tower case with a power supply in it. It originally powered an Abit KT7-RAID mobo with a 1 GHz Athlon and five hard drives, until the Abit's RAID controller went bad - thereupon a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 replaced it, first with the 1 GHz Athlon, then with an Athlon XP 2600+.
This system eventually had most of the drives switched over to Samsung SATA units, and a sixth Seagate PATA drive to boot. I managed to wear out the PSU's cooling fan, and replaced it. Everything was going great until this morning. While I was recompiling PHP, I heard a muffled pop immediately followed by the kerchunk of six hard drives parking and a dark screen.
Power button? No joy. Then I smelled a faint whiff of smoked capacitor. Uh-oh.
I decided to get something a bit beefier, perhaps overkill, and ended up with an OCZ GameXStream 700W unit. Yeah, it has Teapos inside, but the FSP labeling on the PCB is clearly visible through the fan, and I have a lot more confidence in FSP than ChannelWell.
When I opened up the fried Antec, sure enough, it was stuffed full of Fuhjyyus. As it turned out, I only saw one with visible signs of popping - a 2200 uF that was clearly popped up from the bottom. Oh well... I got six years of mostly 24/7 operation with it.
One thing I've noticed with the new unit - it appears to be a lot more efficient. I've noticed a significant drop in the load reported by my UPS - and my CPU temperature has dropped by about 5° C to boot. I'm not sure if the cooler CPU is due to improved airflow or better power quality.
As it turned out, in its last few minutes, the Antec's power consumption was spiking, based on my MRTG graph of the UPS's load level.
This system eventually had most of the drives switched over to Samsung SATA units, and a sixth Seagate PATA drive to boot. I managed to wear out the PSU's cooling fan, and replaced it. Everything was going great until this morning. While I was recompiling PHP, I heard a muffled pop immediately followed by the kerchunk of six hard drives parking and a dark screen.
Power button? No joy. Then I smelled a faint whiff of smoked capacitor. Uh-oh.
I decided to get something a bit beefier, perhaps overkill, and ended up with an OCZ GameXStream 700W unit. Yeah, it has Teapos inside, but the FSP labeling on the PCB is clearly visible through the fan, and I have a lot more confidence in FSP than ChannelWell.
When I opened up the fried Antec, sure enough, it was stuffed full of Fuhjyyus. As it turned out, I only saw one with visible signs of popping - a 2200 uF that was clearly popped up from the bottom. Oh well... I got six years of mostly 24/7 operation with it.
One thing I've noticed with the new unit - it appears to be a lot more efficient. I've noticed a significant drop in the load reported by my UPS - and my CPU temperature has dropped by about 5° C to boot. I'm not sure if the cooler CPU is due to improved airflow or better power quality.
As it turned out, in its last few minutes, the Antec's power consumption was spiking, based on my MRTG graph of the UPS's load level.
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