shit psus will explode?

[Blackhole890]

@Energycore, @STRMfrmXMN and the rest of LTT community, i have a question (that previously asked here but i still have some questions)

 

So basically a lot of you guys says that if i get a cheap PSU = BOOM!! My pc goes down or my pc components lifespan gets shorter. no? + more electrical bill, so this one hasn't 80+ rating and the inside of these psu components are potato has more % to stop working or burn your house...? What about my school computers which they have at least 8 years and they have been working until today and didn't "explode"? I dont think that those psus arent a potato but does reflect when you only use 10-30% of the psu so it doesnt overheat = it will not get burn ?

[WereCat]

Cheap PSU doesent necessarily mean BOOM!

It can however drasticaly lower the life span of your other components.. usualy bad power supplies kill motherboards quite fast and if only motherboard goes, consider yourself lucky.

[79wjd]

Shitty PSUs are fine for low power systems -- like something you would fine in an office or at a school. They become a problem when they're expected to power something more demanding or when they're put in a very hot environment.

 

So, take the PSU tier list in my signature. Basically anything from any tier is good enough for an office system (although tier 5 or above is still a good idea). Tier 5 and above for a moderate load system -- something like an RX460/GTX1050. Tier 4 and above for basically anything else (although, if you're going really high end -- 1070 or SLI 1070s, then ideally tier 3 or above). 

[Taja]

I never saw a psu explode. But it can happen, its not a "BOOM", but it means fire.

 

I had a lot of cheap PSUs before i got into the hardware world, and all that happened was they would stop working in very little time. Sometimes i smelled burning eletronics coming from the PSU. Never any other component died with the PSU.

 

My last crappy PSU lasted for a long time, but when i tried to use a 750ti, it wouldnt work because the PSU had horrible stability, the GPU couldnt handle 800 MHz clock for more than 10 minutes.

 

And if you have a crappy "600w", it means its actually 300w probably.

[Ashiella]

Logisys 800w.

[typographie]

22 minutes ago, Blackhole890 said:

So basically a lot of you guys says that if i get a cheap PSU = BOOM!! My pc goes down or my pc components lifespan gets shorter. no? + more electrical bill, so this one hasn't 80+ rating and the inside of these psu components are potato has more % to stop working or burn your house...? What about my school computers which they have at least 8 years and they have been working until today and didn't "explode"? I dont think that those psus arent a potato but does reflect when you only use 10-30% of the psu so it doesnt overheat = it will not get burn ?

No PSU is ever expected to explode or start a fire as normal behavior, no matter how poor quality it is. PSUs can do that if they are seriously defective or suffer some kind of catastrophic hardware failure, and in that case they don't even have to be poor quality. A Seasonic or Super Flower PSU can explode under certain circumstances, too.

 

A poor quality PSU primarily means its electrical performance is sub-par. It may not be able to output its rated wattage with low ripple or reliable operation, or it may not last as long, or it may not live up to it's efficiency rating (or even have an efficiency rating), or something. Just being poor quality might mean major hardware failures are vaguely more likely, but that's never expected behavior.

[Enderman]

 

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

Shit psu will have sex with your wife, drink all your beer, and steal your money. Don't get shit psu

[Blackhole890]

28 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Cheap PSU doesent necessarily mean BOOM!

It can however drasticaly lower the life span of your other components.. usualy bad power supplies kill motherboards quite fast and if only motherboard goes, consider yourself lucky.

then, every spanish guy is lucky coz i havent ever seen somebody explode their psus

27 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Shitty PSUs are fine for low power systems -- like something you would fine in an office or at a school. They become a problem when they're expected to power something more demanding or when they're put in a very hot environment.

 

So, take the PSU tier list in my signature. Basically anything from any tier is good enough for an office system (although tier 5 or above is still a good idea). Tier 5 and above for a moderate load system -- something like an RX460/GTX1050. Tier 4 and above for basically anything else (although, if you're going really high end -- 1070 or SLI 1070s, then ideally tier 3 or above). 

what about my friend which is gaming AAA titles with a tacens mars mp600 as psu... and he has an i7-3xxx + 970 and worked fine for few years (2-3). And thanks for the list but i already knew that this list existed and got cx450m  @Taja

19 minutes ago, typographie said:

A poor quality PSU primarily means its electrical performance is sub-par. It may not be able to output its rated wattage with low ripple or reliable operation, or it may not last as long, or it may not live up to it's efficiency rating (or even have an efficiency rating), or something. Just being poor quality might mean major hardware failures are vaguely more likely, but that's never expected behavior.

does that the warranty cover? (in my case, if my psu  (cx450m, bought it in this january) stops working because of that)

[Blackhole890]

3 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

have sex with your wife, drink all your beer, and steal your money.

if someday i have a wife lol, im still 16 years old man D:

[79wjd]

5 minutes ago, Blackhole890 said:

then, every spanish guy is lucky coz i havent ever seen somebody explode their psus

what about my friend which is gaming AAA titles with a tacens mars mp600 as psu... and he has an i7-3xxx + 970 and worked fine for few years (2-3). And thanks for the list but i already knew that this list existed and got cx450m  @Taja

does that the warranty cover? (in my case, if my psu  (cx450m, bought it in this january) stops working because of that)

Even the best Tier 1 PSU can go bad and the worst POS can last forever. But statistically, a better quality PSU will last much longer and pose less of a risk. 

[KenjiUmino]

31 minutes ago, Taja said:

I never saw a psu explode.

i did not see one explode like with a big fireball or something but my first PSU did go out with a loud bang and grey smoke.

 

one of the capacitors exploded leaving a big black scorch mark on the PCB - the metal cap must have popped right off because i found it flying around inside the PSU looking like an empty 9mm bullet shell.

 

fortunately it did not kill any other components right on the spot but the mainboard died a year later. 

 

the second psu that died on me really took the board with it - something must have gone wrong with the 5V rail because all the 5V pins on the ATX connector were fused to the sockets, i had to literally pry the two pieces of molten plasic apart. 

 

having a psu fail is not funny but this extreme scenario only happened with two out of i-don't-know-how-many PSUs i put into computers since i started playing around with hardware so i guess most people won't see that happen at all.

 

i had some more PSU failures but none of them have been that spectacular ever since

 

i noticed that all of the PSUs that failed have been used in gaming systems running balls to the wall all day so i guess your school PCs are still alive because they never got pushed hard enough.

 

my conclusion is that a cheap psu might be fine for years when it only has to deliver like one third of the load it's capable of but might fail pretty quick when maxed out for a while.

[TheRandomness]

-Thread moved to Cases and Power Supplies. Please remember to post in the correct subforum.

[STRMfrmXMN]

2 hours ago, Blackhole890 said:

@Energycore, @STRMfrmXMN and the rest of LTT community, i have a question (that previously asked here but i still have some questions)

 

So basically a lot of you guys says that if i get a cheap PSU = BOOM!! My pc goes down or my pc components lifespan gets shorter. no? + more electrical bill, so this one hasn't 80+ rating and the inside of these psu components are potato has more % to stop working or burn your house...? What about my school computers which they have at least 8 years and they have been working until today and didn't "explode"? I dont think that those psus arent a potato but does reflect when you only use 10-30% of the psu so it doesnt overheat = it will not get burn ?

Most don't literally explode. Usually when a PSU is failing it fails gently. You'll notice it has trouble working with a GPU installed in your system or with desktop hard drives in your system (as opposed to laptop HDDs or SSDs which use less power) and that sort of thing. If it explodes you either had a really shitty unit or some sort of failure of OCP or that sort of thing happened.

[Blackhole890]

2 hours ago, TheRandomness said:

-Thread moved to Cases and Power Supplies. Please remember to post in the correct subforum.

but isnt this a general discussion? because we are arguing our thoughts no? and i apologize 

[TheRandomness]

1 minute ago, Blackhole890 said:

but isnt this a general discussion? because we are arguing our thoughts no? and i apologize 

It's related to Power Supplies more than anything.

[typographie]

3 hours ago, Blackhole890 said:

does that the warranty cover? (in my case, if my psu  (cx450m, bought it in this january) stops working because of that)

It should, provided it's a problem that you didn't cause through mistreatment or something. If something goes wrong with your CX450M within its warranty period, you have every right to contact Corsair about it. I've personally had several very positive experiences with Corsair customer service, including once when the product wasn't even under warranty anymore (which was a power supply, coincidentally)… though I'm in the U.S. and I don't know how their support is for people in other parts of the world.

 

I'm going to mention that while the Corsair CX and to some degree CS lines get a lot of shit, they are not so bad that you should have to worry about pyrotechnics under normal circumstances. They're some of the "better" low-end PSUs. They're considered low-end because of their price, value, and electrical performance, not because they are generally a safety hazard.

[kayotics]

Yeah a crap psu can not only cause maybe a fire hazard but if it goes it can completely break all of your components. As cool as it would be to see your psu explode I don't think you would like to buy stuff to replace your broken components.

[Genius1237]

They may not explode during normal use. But once, just as I turned on a system, the generator cutoff and the immediately switched to normal power. In this process, a cheap 10 year old PSU(unbranded) in the system blew.

Anything made by decent brands should be fine.

[Energycore]

On 1/2/2017 at 8:58 AM, Blackhole890 said:

@Energycore, @STRMfrmXMN and the rest of LTT community, i have a question (that previously asked here but i still have some questions)

 

So basically a lot of you guys says that if i get a cheap PSU = BOOM!! My pc goes down or my pc components lifespan gets shorter. no? + more electrical bill, so this one hasn't 80+ rating and the inside of these psu components are potato has more % to stop working or burn your house...? What about my school computers which they have at least 8 years and they have been working until today and didn't "explode"? I dont think that those psus arent a potato but does reflect when you only use 10-30% of the psu so it doesnt overheat = it will not get burn ?

I know there is a lot of confusion regarding the topic of dangerous PSUs. I'll try to make a couple things clear.

 

When we say a bad PSU will blow up, we mean it, but the reason school computers with piece of shit PSUs last for quite a while, and it's pretty simple: The less you load a PSU, the less its components are stressed. School computers are at most pulling 100W off the PSU, and that's for small bursts of time as they spend most of their life idling (and at idle they could be pulling as little as 5W, depending on the computer's power saving features, more realistically about 20-30W).

 

But just because a crap PSU will last a really long time on a school computer, is not reason enough for us to recommend them even for people on a budget here on LTT, because the most people who ask here are looking to do power-hungry applications, be it gaming or workstation use. When your computer starts pulling 250W while gaming, suddenly these crap PSUs age a lot faster.

 

Every PSU will die eventually, that's because the capacitors they are built with have a limited lifetime; what separates a good PSU from a bad one is for one that it will last longer (better capacitors and more of them, so they are less stressed), and more importantly that it has the necessary protection features to guarantee that when it does die, it doesn't send a jolt of current down some component in your computer (really bad PSUs will do that even during their lifetime).

 

I know I just printed a wall of text, so to summarize:

 

a) Bad PSUs can run on really low power computers for really long periods of time

b) When a bad PSU dies, it most of the time takes something else with it

c) Really bad PSUs might even kill other parts during their lifetime

d) (since I've seen so many people ask about this) coil whine is completely unrelated to PSU quality, or even a single piece of hardware. It's mostly random, you get it if you were a bad boy during the year and santa got mad, or something.