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Antec RMA hell

H

hardc0re

Gawd
Joined
Sep 19, 2006
Messages
869
Hi,

I wanted to bring to light the problems with Antec's power supplies, specifically the Smart Power series and Antec's shady business practises. A year ago I had purchased a Antec Sonata II case, which came with a 450 watt Smart Power 2.0 power supply, for $135 , which sounded like a good deal. A month ago the power supply failed, high pitch whining and clanking sounds. An RMA was processed and I received a new unit in 3 week's time, in a nice packaging, professionally crafted art and blurb about Antec's history printed on the side. During my down time , my system was running off a 300 Watt 6 year old no-name power supply.

I installed the new power supply and hoped for the best, powered on the system the whining sound started and fan clanking began when some load was put on the CPU.
Next day at work I spoke to friends who had gone through more trouble with the same model with multiple RMA's, all of which were duds (untolerable whine noise), they switched to other manufacturers instead because Antec was not delivering a professional level of support. It's quite sad a company advertises "the Smarter Choice" and "...supremely stable power supplies" does just the opposite.
 
The Smartpower was never one of their beefier power supplies, but I can definitely see what you're getting at.
 
That definately sux. I personally have had good experiences with their RMA process. RMA'd a NeoPower 480 and got a NeoHE 500.
 
Even good power supplies can have their bad days, I hope you realize that. Keep RMAing unless you want to spend more on a different unit.
 
Could it possibly be user error? Don't take any offense but its from my experience that multiple failed units/RMA's are usually caused by end user error rather than manufacturer error. Of course there are exceptions like exceedingly bad luck or defects in the manufacturing process (X800XL caps falling off for example) but a lot of times multiple RMA's for the same product are caused by a simple user error. That being said I feel for your situation and I know how frustrating things like that could be.
 
gchanjam said:
Could it possibly be user error? Don't take any offense but its from my experience that multiple failed units/RMA's are usually caused by end user error rather than manufacturer error. Of course there are exceptions like exceedingly bad luck or defects in the manufacturing process (X800XL caps falling off for example) but a lot of times multiple RMA's for the same product are caused by a simple user error. That being said I feel for your situation and I know how frustrating things like that could be.
Click to expand...


Interesting.
what kind of user error can you have with a PSU that makes it whine and clank?
Perhaps we should stop poking sticks in the fan.
 
the user error was being naive enough to buy into Antec's false advertising. Just picked up an Enermax Noisetaker, which retails $5 less than the Antec SP450 and the performance difference is like night and day. I've sent Antec an email explaining that these power supplies are defective due to faulty capacitors and hope they will foot the shipping bill and send me back a unit that works.
 
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