tensixtyone » psu http://tensixtyone.com Rants of Andrew Williams / Nik_Doof Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:58:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Cheap PSUs, False Economy http://tensixtyone.com/perma/cheap-psus-false-economy http://tensixtyone.com/perma/cheap-psus-false-economy#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:42:00 +0000 Andrew Williams http://blog.tensixtyone.com//2007/04/24/cheap-psus-false-economy In the last few days I’ve had issues with my temperamental PSU, I’m not sure if its due to high load or just being faulty after a year of using it, but it just sometimes refuses to start up the PC. Yesterday I had to fix it, I went to Alpha Computers and purchased a £16 450 Watt PSU. The PC now boots first time and I’m happy.

Or at least I thought I was…

I wandered into the computer room this morning to find my PC off, I get the PC started again but I’m bemused to what has happened. Checking the logs I see one painful line:

localhost kernel: ACPI: Critical trip point

No mention of any temperatures or overheating processors, everything is running below 30c and high load presents no heat spikes, not even on the GPU. I check lm_sensors to see what else is failing to see a flurry of “ALARM” entries, all on the 3.3v, 5v, and 12v lines. It seems that this cheap PSU can’t even keep up with a load of a Geforce 6 series, 2 HDDs and a Athlon64.

So now i’ll have to invest in a worthwhile PSU, at a higher cost. Really I deserved it for trying to skimp on one of the most critical parts of a PC.

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