So my Diablotek power supply was designed in hell?

I thought mine was a bit loud, but after some general research am finding that's the least of my worries.

A few years ago my next door neighbor needed a power supply, and bought a Diablotek for $50 locally. I looked it up on eBay and it was $15 at the time, shipped. I was installing it when she told me she was moving and I could keep the power supply. Then another neighbor asked if I could fix his laptop. One evening's work later, they asked if I could use a computer that lacked a power supply. Sure. Crazy how that fell into place.

Now I realize it's too loud and I should think about replacing it, and Tom's Hardware and other places insinuate I've been lucky it didn't fry my system several times over. True, Debian ran hot and I've had to replace RAM several times, and the power supply might have something to do with it.

So if you don't mind, I was wondering if there's any low noise units in the 600W range that are at that sweet spot of low cost and reliable performance? I'm seeing some names at eBay for $20-25 that aren't on the Ton's Hardware no-buy list, have one large fan and are said to be quiet, but you guys are smarter than the average bears...

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Diablotek is the only cheap power supply that is any good. Other brands of the cheap power supply's are Garbage. Had the Diablotek DA600 and did not damage any mainboards.

Thanks Mike, I stand re-calibrated. True it's been working four years with no death rays, and the only power supply that DID do that was an Antec nine years ago. So it goes to show, you never know if the reviews out there are some competing entity.

Knock on wood, I'll try to swap power supplies just to lower the noise, but true I haven't had a problem that can be for-sure blamed on Diablotek.

My results might not be typical because everything I have computer-wise is plugged into quality surge and noise protection units.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2016 02:14PM by JoeyPogoPlugE02.

low-end hardware has higher failure rates, but that does not mean that they ALL fail horribly within 2 years.

PSUs tend to kill hard drives and GPUs more than motherboards or devices over them (CPU/RAM).

Are you sure you need a 600w unit? What hardware is in that PC?

It is better to take a good quality PSU with less wattage than a crap PSU with more wattage, if your power needs are still satisfied.

bobafetthotmail Wrote:

What hardware is in that PC?
>

It's a Benicia (IPIBL) motherboard, quadcore 6600, 8GB DDR2 and nVidia probably 8200 GPU and two 3.5" hard drives. It was a gift from a neighbor right when my previous dualcore 4400+ bit the dust after 11 years.

I put nickles and dimes into it and the performance for my needs is very good - I'm well aware a lot of new hardware blows this out of the water, but mine's tweaked real nice and hooked to decent hardware like an RME Fireface 800, 24-channel mixer with flying faders and some other goodies. Definitely not a game computer, though Unreal Tournament 2004 still gets run every time at least :-).

The tower itself cruises at around 105 watts, sometimes 90 and sometimes 120, but you're right, I have a 400 watt Antec here and it might replace mine. the only trouble is the 4-wire jobbie that goes to the motherboard, mine's just a hair too short, like by one inch. So I might either switch cases or look for a 4-conductor extension cord and see how that looks.

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>The tower itself cruises at around 105 watts, sometimes 90 and sometimes 120,

Well within the (true) spec of most crappy PSUs then, most are 250-300W units that can theoretically for 60 seconds reach 500-600W.

It shouldn't be an issue, but if you can change to a better brand like Antec it is better.

Thank you kindly Bob, that's a plan. I hesitate to move this out of the Antec Sonata II case into a smaller one, but the 4-conductor yellow-yellow black-black lines would reach.

Occasionally there's on older computer available to me, and I LOVE re-configuring hardware as a rich person would have when it first came out, maximum RAM and all that, best GPU for the era. Then see what latest OS it'll run and all that. Because it's a media machine and my hardware don't love Linux, this has to stay Windows 7 and Hackintosh Snow Leopard, two very happy OS.

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