What's your Experience with OEM Power Supplies?

[LloydLynx]

I've found Dell PSUs to be very reliable, thus making me wonder about others.

My Optiplex has a 290w that's powering an rx560/i5 4590/16gb quad DIMMs/hard drive and ssd/lots of peripherals. Most PSU calculators recommend around 350w for my specs, which amazes me because my PSU hardly gets warm under a heavy load. I also have an 18yo 170w powering my 12w/24w CB transceiver no issue. I've seen the Optiplex continue running when the lights flicker/dim, while my monitor can't handle that kind power of fluctuation.

So am I just lucky, or does Dell just make great PSUs? And what about other OEMs PSUs, what are your experiences? What about some catastrophic failure stories?

[kelvinhall05]

Dell isn't making the PSUs, they just buy them from someone like Delta.

 

 

 

If Dell made PSUs they would probably burn your house down.

[DailyProcrastinator]

I have usually found that OEM PSU's are 'okay' as well, however, Dell buys their PSU's form a different OEM vendor, they are not Dell PSU's. But honestly I find OEM PSU reliability to be a factor of low power draw from the system, therefore low stress on the PSU. After 8+ years of use I have run into a few issue with a few different prebuilt PC's. The first truly power hungry system my parents bought needed the PSU replaced after 4 years, this was just before I got into computers. 

 

Once I actually had built by first PC, my brother got me a cheap PSU, because he claimed it was good value and he was running the same one issue free for a year in his system, a Thermaltake TR2. After about 8 months and some research I realized how bad that PSU was, I swapped it for a much better quality PSU and shortly after, with under 2 years of use, that same PSU that my brother continued to use died and took his motherboard and HDD with it. Since then I have never cheeped out on a PSU for a custom built PC. Unfortunately, I learned my lesson again though when I bought a server rack and trusted the included PSU. It ended up killing 24TB of data within 6 months of use from new. So for higher power use systems and ones with more continuous draw using included OEM PSU's in my opinion is not recommended.

 

 

[Fasauceome]

28 minutes ago, TheJooomes said:

Most PSU calculators recommend around 350w for my specs, which amazes me because my PSU hardly gets warm under a heavy load

I doubt your PSU has a temp sensor for you to find that out, but yeah it's no surprise that PSU calcs are wrong since they're known to exaggerate.

[GDRRiley]

HP put a horrible sparkle power unit in my parents desktop. it got replaced as soon as they got a real GPU, a hd 5750 for minecraft.

[Bombastinator]

OEM power supplies can be incredibly reliable as long as they stay in the machine they were built for and that machine is not modded.  The trick is you can’t take em out or use them as they were not intended.

[Spotty]

The PSUs you find in prebuilts are going to work fine for that system and should last the life of that system without issues. There's a lot of pre-built office PCs out there and reliability wise they're actually pretty good.

The problem is when you want to do something with the system that the manufacturer didn't intend. Like adding a new graphics card for example, or even just adding extra HDDs can be a problem if there's only 2 SATA connectors coming off the PSU which does seem to be common. As soon as you start wanting to make changes that's where you face issues.

[Guest]

22 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

HP put a horrible sparkle power unit in my parents desktop. it got replaced as soon as they got a real GPU, a hd 5750 for minecraft.

What made it horrible?

 

Sparkle is FSP, if you didn't know.

 

[GDRRiley]

2 minutes ago, jonnyGURU said:

What made it horrible?

 

Sparkle is FSP, if you didn't know.

 

was loud and was too small  for the system 250-300W. a core 2 quad with dual HDD had I put in any GPU that drew PCIE power I would have hit the limit.

[Chiyawa]

Most OEM PSU is pretty decent, in my opinion, at least reliable enough to last them until the whole system either got replaced or died (My Dell PC had its motherboard fried after 7 years).

 

But with that said, Many OEM do have different quality for different model. Dell, as an example, Inspiron model has a slight lower quality PSU although it has higher wattage. Dell Vostro has a more reliable PSU than Inspiron model, although it is low powered. XPS do have a decent PSU with decent high wattage. Precision range share the same PSU with XPS. Of course, they do change their PSU from time to time, so this info may not be accurate, but this is what I get generally.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

was loud and was too small  for the system 250-300W.

It was too small?  How do you know?  Did it shut down or, worse, blow up?

 

[Juular]

4 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

was loud and was too small  for the system 250-300W. a core 2 quad with dual HDD had I put in any GPU that drew PCIE power I would have hit the limit.

Assuming it was rated for full power at 12V rail, this would've been well enough for 80-100W Core 2 Quad and 80-90W HD5750.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

On 3/5/2020 at 4:34 PM, jonnyGURU said:

What made it horrible?

 

Sparkle is FSP, if you didn't know.

 

Hey was wondering, what do you think the quality of this PSU would have been in its day, relative to other PSUs then available?  (For example assume the best available then would have been Tier A+ or Tier S, even if by today's standards, quality or design or otherwise, they wouldn't even qualify for Tier E.)  I don't think it would have been high end, but would it have been maybe midrange, or on the lower end, or would it have been a firebomb even then?

[Juular]

2 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Hey was wondering, what do you think the quality of this PSU would have been in its day, relative to other PSUs then available?  (For example assume the best available then would have been Tier A+ or Tier S, even if by today's standards, quality or design or otherwise, they wouldn't even qualify for Tier E.)  I don't think it would have been high end, but would it have been maybe midrange, or on the lower end, or would it have been a firebomb even then?

I really don't think it really mattered that much for Pentium II lol. For today standards it's trash.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

54 minutes ago, Juular said:

I really don't think it really mattered that much for Pentium II lol. For today standards it's trash.

Ahh ... speaking of PSUs for Pentium II or other older systems ....

"Tier D - Potentially dangerous, but only in specific situations" - would those, for example, be fine with an Ivy Bridge or other older-than-Haswell system?  Or should they be relegated to pre-Pentium 4 duty (or when CPUs started using the 12V rail iirc)?

"Tier E - Potentially dangerous in multiple scenarios" - Or would these be the ones that should be used for Pentium III and older? Or maybe this is the tier to look at if someone needs a pre-ATX (for example AT, XT, PC, etc) PSU?

 

 

 

Also I've been thinking of an idea for a challenge for the PCMR community (or whoever, idk yet) to build a "cringe" gaming PC that has all the parts / features that would make entuhsiast gamers cringe, but at the same time doesn't blow up in their face, because they're using it appropriately (for example playing retro games).  I won't give much details now, other than the PSU would have the voltage selector switch, no more than like 10A on the 12V rail (if it even has one at all), case would have a completely closed motherboard tray and no back-side cable management space, CPU air cooler can't have heatpipes or copper, GPU can't have cost more than $50 USD when it was new, can't use storage / boot drive faster than a 5400rpm PATA HDD, among other things.  (Still kinda thinking about how I'd work out the details though, and idk when or where I'll post it yet - have no timetable, i've thought of it off and on over the last year or more iirc. ... as well as another one that basically would be like a REALLY retro PC, using only components from the days before any auto-configuration was supported, like MFM hard drives, ISA slots, AT PSUs, pre-SIMM RAM, etc.)

[JoostinOnline]

On 3/5/2020 at 6:44 PM, GDRRiley said:

was loud and was too small  for the system 250-300W. a core 2 quad with dual HDD had I put in any GPU that drew PCIE power I would have hit the limit.

But that doesn't make it awful. The loudness maybe, but it wasn't designed for a GPU. It's like calling a laptop battery terrible because it can't power a car.

[Juular]

1 hour ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

"Tier D - Potentially dangerous, but only in specific situations" - would those, for example, be fine with an Ivy Bridge or other older-than-Haswell system?  Or should they be relegated to pre-Pentium 4 duty (or when CPUs started using the 12V rail iirc)?

Tier D mostly consists of units that perform in crossloads really bad (i.e they're very old group regulated designs), say, going out of spec (or close to going out of spec, even 4% are high for modern systems IMO, ATX specs are old) in extreme low 5V high 12V loads, or having bad performance in general, like going out of spec on ripple (or again, being close to going out of spec, like 100mV+) inside 0-100% load range. So, while most of them would work fine without visible issues even with relatively high-end modern builds, that doesn't mean they're a good pick, bad voltage regulation and high ripple will toll other components lifespan, there might be stability issues and in the case of lacking protections they obviously may not catch if smth goes wrong, blowing up and potentially taking other components with them or letting your PC fry itself if they don't catch the short in, say, MOLEX adapter.

Tier E are just straight up garbage, again, they may work without noticeable issues but they're literally ticking bombs.

[Guest]

17 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Hey was wondering, what do you think the quality of this PSU would have been in its day, relative to other PSUs then available?  (For example assume the best available then would have been Tier A+ or Tier S, even if by today's standards, quality or design or otherwise, they wouldn't even qualify for Tier E.)  I don't think it would have been high end, but would it have been maybe midrange, or on the lower end, or would it have been a firebomb even then?

Those were great for their time.  Probably the best you could buy.  But I wouldn't use one today.  Too much +5V and very low +12V.

 

When I worked as an Avaya installer, we used a bunch of Aopen chassis that came bundled with this very PSU and we never saw a PSU failure (and yes, this was during the time I was still reviewing PSUs).

 

And someone needs to vacuum out their PC.