Digital Wanderer

   So [cut] calls me recently. And in a slightly confused voice tells me about how her computer keeps freezing. I couldn't leave a girl in distress, so I rushed over to rescue her. The symptoms were as follows:
the PC freezes, then refuses to turn on and pitifully beeps like this: "trrrrrrrrrrr", meaning lots of rapid, tiny short beeps.

   I, obviously, immediately check the motherboard manual. But the Chinese (Taiwanese) consider us to be dumb end-users and therefore do not provide a translation for the computer's wailing. I had to trudge home to scour Google, although I had already formed some hypotheses by then. And on the Net, I only found a mention that a PC can make such a sound when there are problems with RAM. However, it was immediately clear - this wasn't the case, because the PC in question is already 2 years old, and the problems started a week ago.

   I accepted problems with the motherboard or the power supply as the most likely hypothesis. Ultimately, I took apart my own rig, which is stuffed with fairly high-quality hardware, pulled out the power supply, memory, and video card, and brought them over to test. Just as I expected, despite the signature sound, the problem wasn't the memory. Fortunately, it didn't turn out to be the motherboard either - because after swapping the Chinese trash power supply for my INWIN IW300-A, everything fired up and ran like a charm.

   In connection with this, I remembered the following. I'm a proponent of choosing quality stuff, though preferably not too financially burdensome. But I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who point-blank do not understand why you should buy high-quality PC components, and consider it a waste of money. "It works anyway, so why pay more?"

   So I'll answer like this. A few years ago I had 2 hard drives burn out in a row. Fortunately, they were replaced under warranty back then, but I lost a good amount of my data. And now, after reading dozens of pages on forums, I realize that the culprit was most likely a killer PSU made by the hellish firm CODEGEN, which mass-produces extra-cheap, ultra-low-quality crap. After two years of service, this brick safely and neatly burned to a crisp. Just like, by the way, an identical PSU belonging to my college classmate Inessa.

   If you do a search on the forums or ask a repair guy, you can observe an infinite number of such cases with cheap, crappy power supplies. It's a blessing if, during their demise, these devices don't drag a bunch of other computer parts into the grave with them, which also happens quite often.

   I was told another story where due to voltage spikes, a PSU fried right along with the motherboard. And so two times in a row. The consensus is that with a high-quality PSU, it would have ended with just the PC shutting down, or at worst, only the PSU itself breaking.

   In the end, I made an executive decision not to fix the Chinese patient, as it was fatally broken from the moment of its creation. Instead, I decided to give my PSU to the girl, and buy a new one for myself - a more powerful one, with some headroom for the future, where, as we all know, multi-core processors and cabinets full of disk arrays that suck power like a clothes iron await us.

   Through three hours of scouting on ixbt and searching google in Latvia, it turned out that the only decent PSUs you can buy in our backwoods are made by the company FSP GROUP(a.k.a. FORTRON/SOURCE). Unfortunately, either the models were not the ones I wanted, or there was no trust in the firm selling the PSUs (although generally, the situation with this is good here - the firms are quite reliable and responsible).
   In the end, I found FSP-made units in the price list of an excellent outfit, Jet Computer, but without the exact models specified. One email later, and I already have the necessary info, though without a price for some reason. Gotta love these local quirks. But for once, they wrote not in translit, and with proper grammar. Usually, you get a mishmash of Latin letters and numbers, with no capital letters at the beginning of sentences and no punctuation marks.
   However, it was a Saturday, and therefore they only sent me the reply on Monday. But I sneakily read it right during a lecture from my mobile phone via the Gmail mobile service, and was very surprised by the good price. So I didn't hesitate, just went straight there and bought it.

And the moral of the story is this.
   Buy quality products, citizens. I'm not campaigning for the heavyweights like ANTEC or ENERMAX that cost $100 for 300 Watts. But just for PSUs from respectable brands. Namely: Delta, FSP, with some reservations InWIN or Sirtech(HPC). Like my FSP400-60THN-P.
   It has: ATX 12V 2.01 standard compliance, two independent 12-volt rails, a fairly quiet 12-centimeter diameter fan, passive power factor correction (PFC). Plus a 24-pin connector for newer PCs, while still including an adapter in the box. And finally - long cables, 1 SATA drive power connector, and an honest 400 watts of total power. All while costing $45
   For the nightmarish $25 Codegen PSUs and other similar "Chinese" units, 400 watts on the label equals a real 200 or 250, plus poor quality components and the risk of losing a PC worth an order of magnitude more.
Do you really need that?

Related links
PSU section on ixbt

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