OT: - PC PSU's

A 500w PSU will cost you about £38 from Scan.co.uk or as I have just done buy one from ebay. Brand new 500w cost me including postage £16!!!

What are you putting in the machine? (in terms of hard drives, DVD drives etc.) unless you're putting in lots of drives and peripherals then you don't need anything with a particularly high power output.

I would recommend buying a decent one though, as in my past life I found PSU failures were the most common failure, plus the more expensive ones tend to be near silent now. Have also heard rumours of cheap PSU's causing system crashes due to a poor quality output - sounds plausible enough, but never actually confirmed it myself.

Matt

unless youre going to be running a shed load of drives off it and a fancy gfx card then i'd just go for the cheapest/quietest one they have.

Looking at overclockers (i assume this is where you are looking too?), the lowest rating they have in a std size one seems to be 350w. this should do it no probs.

This might be of use somewhere in your project:

Richard

In message , Lee_D writes

Bout 3" x 2" x2" - trying to keep sensible but failing :)

Take a look at:

and

You might be lucky and be able to use the 4 pin in your 8 pin plug. The biggest worry is probably the melting one. Failing that Anne Adapter is your friend from a disc drive power connection.

Is there an easy way to cut power and noise? I'm happy with this 2Ghz pentium 4 for everything but would like it quieter and cheaper to run.

AJH

Ask yourself if you need all that power ? Buy a MiniITX based system and you have a somewhat slower box (runs at 1Gig), but consumes 13W. The VIA nano- and pico- itx boards can are similar power, but even smaller.

Steve

On or around Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:31:05 GMT, "cyberwraith" enlightened us thusly:

although I've got a cheapo-special here which is not all that old and has a noisy fan bearing, that will soon have to either have the fan or the PSU replaced.

I'm happy with 1GHz Athlons for web/mail/news/accounts/letters etc. You only need oodles of processing umph if you are into games or video production. I looked at miniITX systems the other week but system units came in at several hundred squid. I need to do some more maths...

I keep fancying a mini itx for keeping my WSM's on in the garage like you say they work out pricy compared to the bargain stuff the box shifters sell. What about a second user sff ( small form factor) HP IBM Compaq etc they seem to be popping up and being ex Office machines crap for games but good enough for 'normal' text based stuff

look at the clearance bit

Derek

now where did I put the instruction leaflet for that tricky torque wrench and how big is 50 newtons?

Dave Liquorice wrote: I looked at miniITX systems the other week but system units

? Pico itx system for 200 quid Steve

I'd say probably not, I guess I tend to have a large number of programs open but with only one being actively used most of the time. On checking the task manager it looks like I have 41 processes but only use 2% cpu, what else should I look for?

First problem, the 2 pcs I use were skip dived at a university 3 years ago, part of an array of 12 that allegedly overheated, I only managed to get 3 before they disappeared.

Please point me at them, the only reasons I have for leaving the pc on

24/7 is for a fax and phone management program on the wife's xp box I'd expect all that could sit running in ram with the hdd suspended?

AJH

Have you seen the asus EEE ?

mini laptop which is under £200 :). its about a 1ghz cpu. comes with linux on. Weve just bought one to play with. Boots and runs really quickly (faster than my dual core laptop) as its running off solid state memory rather than a harddisk. cheaper than the mini itx system i put together for my carpc too...

I've moved my main machine over to a laptop. Does all i need. Quieter, and uses much less power (pulls 20-40w vs the 250w+ that my old desktop and monitor did.

Many of the new big name pc's we buy (HP, dell and FS) use a single fan in the case which does both the PSU and the CPU through some fancy ducting. Makes them a lot quieter.

Did it, or is that the PSU rating ?

Steve

, like I said. Very good service to us at any rate - we build ITX board in all our instruments these days.

Steve

Lee_D uttered summat worrerz funny about:

Thanks all for the answers , I've just emerged from under the PC Cover :-)

Transpires after much research and nearly spending under a tenner on an adapter that the 4 pin motherboar plug actually fits the 8 pin socket obviously leaving 4 pin holes free and works fine - DOH! Many a PC out there is running in this way from the forums I browsed. Obviously if I start to run the dual core processor full tilt then it's in my interest to sort the other 4 pins :-)

Minor result and few!

Just need to migrate to the new harddrive now. Sadly the new board doesn't have an old HDD type socket and uses SATA leads so my network is busy shifting the files over as we speak.

Lee D