[geeks] Good quality ATX case with side access HDD bays?

[Phil Stracchino]

On 05/28/10 11:10, nate at portents.com wrote:
> With all due respect, Bill, that's not good advice... the one component I
> recommend no one ever skimp on in any way is the power supply, for the
> simple reason that cheap/bad power supplies not only cost you more in the
> long run due to their low efficiency (converting power from your wall into
> more waste heat), but can damage or destroy the equipment you have hooked
> up to it!
> 
> I've seen cheap power supplies:
> 
> - destroy themselves and destroy motherboard south bridges
> - destroy themselves and destroy video cards
> - destroy themselves and destroy hard drives
> - destroy themselves and destroy CPUs
> - appear to work fine but ruin a motherboards on/off circuitry so it's
> always on

I think I finally isolated what appeared to be a memory error to my
power supply.  At first I thought the memory was bad, to the point that
I actually RMA'd the one stick of memory I was most suspicious of even
though memtest86+ couldn't find anything wrogn with it.  I thought that
it was getting through memtest86+ OK but falling down under heavy load.
 (Say, 15 simultaneous gcc processes.  gcc makes a hell of a memory
stress-tester.)  But I think that what's REALLY going on is that the
power supply is letting me down, and can't actually supply enough 3.3V
current when the system's working flat out to drive the full 3GB of RAM.
 In THEORY, the power supply is rated 420W, and in THEORY, the machine's
power consumption peaks at 390W balls-to-the-wall ... but it's a no-name
power supply that was all I could afford at the time, and though I don't
have the ability to test the theory, I'll bet you almost anything that
it's not delivering full rated power and is letting the output rails sag
at full load.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.