Ok, I'm planning on putting together a new computer pretty soon and
I'm going to eventually go with SLI. It's too expensive right now,
but I'm planning on buying one card now and the other when the price
goes down. Anyway, I need a ATX 2.0 PSU that's over 500 watts. Anyone
have any favorites? I'm looking for longevity and I don't
want an extremely loud PSU. I have a logisys 500 watt PSU and I'd
give it a 4/10 for build quality and a 3/10 for noise. The thing
seems cheaply made and loud. I purchased it in August and already
have had to replace it on warranty, which took nearly a month. I was
thinking about a thermaltake of some sort for this one. Any
opinions?Oh yeah, I'm buying a monitor for this too. What does everyone
thinkof the Viewsonic VP930B? I looking for a monitor that can both play
games and DVD movies, so please don't tell me to buy one of those "3ms
gray to gray Xtreme gaming" Tn+film LCDs that really are 30ms
LCDs that suck on DVD playback. I had more brands in that poll but
the stupid thing only allows so many...
I would start with the list here - scroll down the inner frame:
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_build.html#certified_powersupplies
1) Be careful with quad rail output supplies. At least on the
Asus A8N-SLI motherboards, the EZPlug auxiliary power connector
on the motherboard, when it is used to help two video cards,
will cause two of the outputs of a quad rail supply to be
shorted together. To prevent this, you could rewire the
supply a bit (doing one wire wouldn't be that tough). Or
just avoid quads altogether and stick with dual (12V1/12V2)
type power supplies. With a motherboard that has a 2x2 ATX12V
power connector, you won't be using 12V2 at all on a quad anyway.
Effectively, purchasing a quad means getting a triple
(12V1/12V3/12V4) supply and not getting to use 12V2.
2) Products listed on Newegg frequently include an efficiency
rating. You would expect a more efficient supply (some are
listed as 85%) to run cooler, as it throws out less internal
heat. That means the fan doesn't have to spin as fast, even
at moderate load.
3) Eliminate products with modular wiring, if they have non-keyed
wire assemblies. I notice the comments on Newegg for one
of the Silverstone supplies, mention users ruining gear when
the wire assemblies get reversed. It is always a good idea,
no matter whose power supply you buy, to verify the voltages
and polaritys of the cables, before you plug them in. A
cheap multimeter can save you a lot of money in the long
run.
4) With ordinary supplies, there is usually a list of well
recognized bad brand names. "Deer" for example. Of the
ones on the Nvidia (slizone.com) list, I would avoid
Ultra, based on their past performance. I would not want
to do business with them. I would also avoid the Antec
NeoHE, due to a number of users having trouble with them.
5) The FX600-GLN and the FX700-GLN, on the Slizone web page,
are not linked to the fspgroupusa web site. Which is
mighty strange. Would these be contract built by another
company ? FSPgroup (Fortron/Sparkle) build supplies for
other companies, and it is strange that they would be
buying someone elses. I don't know why those two supplies
are being handled so strangely from a web page perspective,
because they are not on fspgroupusa.com .
6) The Zippy entry is an interesting one. I believe I read
somewhere, that Zippy makes supplies for PCPowerandCooling.
If you check the specs for the Zippy, it has a single
12V @ 40A output! Zippies don't usually have outstanding
efficiency, and the specs make no mention of efficiency,
which means it might be in the 70% ballpark. That means the
heat will be pouring out of that thing. But the beauty
of a single 12V output is that there is no "lost" power
due to the partitioning that happens on dual or quad
12V output supplies. That makes this supply as effective
as the PCPowerandCooling 1KW unit, but without the good
efficiency.
7) The Seasonic S12-600 looks interesting. Their S12
series have pretty good efficiency. A couple of
early reviews were finding substandard 3.3V, which I
haven't seen mentioned since (they were good to about
half load, which probably doesn't matter anyway).
Perhaps that got fixed. The Newegg comments mention
that you don't get exactly 12V from them, but a bit
less. The S12-600 is a dual.
http://www.seasonic.com/pdf/datasheet/01PC/S12.pdf
So you still have a large number of candidates to go through.
The comments on Newegg for some of the products were eye
openers, like the warning about the Silverstone un-keyed
modular wiring.
There are also lots of reviews on the web, and those may
give you some comments about the fan noise.
And I also notice that OCZtechnology still doesn't have
a supply listed on the slizone certified list. I wonder
if it costs money to get Nvidia to list a product
Paul
