Is my PSU ****

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I have been searching for a while for info on my PSU in my pc.

Its a WINPOWER PRO 700w with 2 X 12 Volt dual rails.

After eventually finding it, I have found that it is a very cheap PSU (by that I found it for £32.99 is this a bad thing?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Does it do what you need it to do?

 

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the very expensive PSUs were composed of gold-plating, price-snobbishness and profit in equal parts!

As Simon implied - if it works, what's the problem?

Harry.

 

Usually. Cheap PSUs generally equal poor performance. However, there are exceptions. I don't know anything about Winpower, so I can't offer any specific opinions.

Keep in mind that bad power supplies can cause sporadic/inconsistent problems to appear throughout your system and are very hard to diagnose back to the PSU.

 

To sum up what has been said; "if it aint broke, don't fix it"!

If you had symtoms of a failing (failed) PSU, that's different.

Boyce

 

I dont think there is a problem at the moment but I do intend to upgrade my 8600gt graphics card to a 8800gts 640mb version and I am wondering should I puchase a quality psu to be safe

 

when my PSU broke i found a replacement. different make but same specs. only cost me 13 quid @ a comp fair brand new. bit noisy but does the job cheap lol

 

Yeah mines not the quietest but it smells a bit, smell like burning or something is getting too hot but it hasnt got worse in the whole 9 weeks i have had it

 

Yes you should. As they say, a chain is as strong as it's weakest link. ;)

 

Yeah I was thinking I should get a quality one, because I dont want a cheap psu to fail and burn my comp.

I wonder if there is a test to see if it will take a certain amount of stress. Anyone no of such a test?

 

Well, if it's cheap then if you place it under load it is likely to die. It might be better to test its stability with something like Dr. Power or an alternative. That way you will know how it is performing since component parts are restricted to a small voltage range: too high, then it's likely to blow the component; too low, the component will underperform.

 

cheers dude will try that

 

The stress is the amount of current that the PSU has to supply, this is proportional to the number of hardware devices that it is powering and is affected by how they are being used ie in idle state or maxed out in a 3d game.

The power rating on the PSU (Watts) is the indicator of how able the PSU is to cope with the given load. In your case 700 Watts seems to be ample to me, you would have a hard job putting it under stress.

There are guides on the net that will give you a rough idea of the power dissipation of individual PC hardware components.

 

I think it should be ok, its just when I saw how cheap it was I thought it might be a bit dodgy.

 

Its probably fine. If your having no stability issues like random reboots or BSODs etc then i wouldnt worry about it. I personally try to use good names like seasonic or antec etc coz i think the PSU is one of the most important parts of ya system.

 

well I have been getting BSODs latley but I think thats down to the Nvida drivers for my GPU, I downloaded the most recent updates from Nvidia but it doesnt seem to have made a difference.

Also it only seems to happen when I am running Oblivion and the disk has a slight crack in it (it was a second hand copy) so I dont know if the BSODS are because of my PSU the cracked disk or that the drivers are crap from Nvidia.

It does mention display driver on the blue screen

 

It's pretty straightforward to have an idea of what the BSOD is. Are there any 32bit hex codes? These would be '0x' followed by either eight digits, letters through A-F, or a mixture of both.

The fact that you said that it BSODs when you're running Oblivion points to a memory issue to me rather than a graphics card problem, but we'll see.

Do you get the same issue with any other games?

 

Its 32bit code

It only happens on Oblivion and it mentions the Nvidia display driver by name

Sometimes I dont get blue screen, it just freezes or goes back to windows.

Sometimes when it goes back to windows it'll say display driver has failed and I need to reboot, I have today uninstalled the nvida display drivers and installed them again, but I have had the screen freeze and display driver problem but no BSOD

 

Have you tried different drivers? If your using the newest ones then try the previous version, and if your using an older one, then try the newest ones.

 

I know, mate. I meant that when the screen goes blue there are some seemingly meaningless codes echoed like (0x00000012, 0x12345678, 0x00002352). These numbers and their positions point to specific issues.

If it only specifically happens when Oblivion is running and you have no other issues, then I would patch the game first and retest to avoid downgrading/upgrading the driver that may cause other issues.

Oblivion patches.

Yeah, try patching the game if you haven't.