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have 2 psus, which one?

go with the second one. accounting for temperature, it might give you close to 460w-420w, rather than 360 or lower with the other one.
 
If the 12v+ on the aspire is higher than the 17A on the MGE or has dual 12v+ rails go with it if it is the same or less then I really would suggest a different powersupply with a higher rating on the 12v+ rail your 3500+ venice will thank you for it. :cool:
Chris
 
Just thought I would let you know, I just had a MGE Vigor 400w go out and take my 6800gt with it :(
 
l0cke said:
okay the first psu is the one that came with my case
http://www.xoxide.com/mge-400w-psu.html

And the second is this aspire one that I got on sale.
http://www.xoxide.com/500waassuuvr.html

Don't tell me "don't use either, they suck" because that is spam. And spamming is bad.

So which one is more relibile? I don't think MGE is on the bad list, but it's louder then the aspire and doesn't have fan control.
Click to expand...

Actually telling you they are both bad supplies is not spam. And both are bad supplies. You would be better off using something other than those.
 
Id tend to agree

but lets put it into perspective
there are literally hundreds of thousands of "bad supplies" out there
or what we would consider bad supplies. The point being those supplies, often bundled with a turnkey OEM product where tested to definatively determine what they were capable of and matched to the load that was placed on them by an Elecrical Engineer more often than not.

Where things go horribly horribly wrong is when end users try to do the same thing
that stems from end users beleiving the smoke PSU manufacturers at the lower end try to blow up thier butt and leads to supplies being woefully overloaded and failing, often catastrophically, leading to a $20 component killing several hundred dollars worth of equipment.
Alternately crappy supplies just "wear" on components accelerating their lifecycle and cause truely intermittent problems.

niether Manufacturer of Great Electronics (MGE) or Aspire are highly regarded around these parts
but its your components, personally Id say get a multimeter and see which is more stable
assuming of course youve actually determined that either meets the minimum requirements you need, and since you havent mentioned what your trying to power....

good luck I hope you dont need it
 
Addendum cut and paste 101

as to why "watts" is the lingua franca of power supplies:

once apon a time far far away, most computers had very similar power requirements
thus the amps needed per rail where generally in a set ratio, the +3.3V and +5V rail being what powered most everything that didnt spin, and those rails where in fact one rail as far as the power available was concerned, more draw on one decreased the power available on the other. So a supply rated in watts was a fairly good indicator of whqat to expect.

When CPUs and GPUs started to switch to the +12V rail that all changed

L0s7 4 Lyf3 said:
CPU power question...

Yep, you read the title I have a question about powering CPU's...

What reasons did CPU makers have to switch power draw over to the +12V Rail? What advantages does it have over +3.3V or +5V?
Click to expand...

gee said:
lots of reasons.

The main one is current - if you have a CPU pulling 100W on a motherboard, the Vcore regulator will pull >20 amps from the 5V rail. This is a lot of current to move around... at 12V, the current required is >8.3A - less than half. >20A requires thick PCB traces, heavy cabling, and so on.

You can more efficiently make a power supply that produces low current at high voltage, than a power supply that produces high current at low voltage. So your computer's PSU runs a bit cooler and draws less power from the wall.

And load regulation became an issue - lots of stuff in your computer (PCI cards, hard drive controllers, USB devices) run on 5 volts, and the 5V rail has to be stable. In your average linux box with a Prescott, your computer's CPU changes its power demand from 10W to 100W hundreds of times a second! and this causes immense current swings on the 5V rail, causing it to "jump around", possibily making your computer unstable. Few things in a computer require that the 12V rail is steady - normally it's just used for electromechanical things (fans, hard drive spindles, etc) which don't care if they're getting 10V or 14V. So moving the CPU regulator there made sense, since it keeps crap off the 5V rail.
Click to expand...
(gee is our resident electronics engineer and has actually designed switch mode power supplies SMP which is what we are discussing as opposed to linear, and the above is a very elegant answer to that question)

PSUs more than most components suffer from users perceptions
often subjectivly based perceptions, of course the manufacturers have created an environment that has fostered that.

continuing our story, there have always been manufacturers that have designed very stable and high quality supplies from reliable components, but Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) are to say the least not easy to get right and have several disadvantages over a linear power supply, but because they are both more efficient and can be much smaller for their rating are what has been traditionally employed in computers. The main drawbacks of SMPS is they cant be as tightly regulated (voltage) as a linear without one hell of alot of additional circuitry, and they are "noisy" meaning that AC power spikes leak into the converted DC power as Periodic and Random Deviation (PARD) otherwise known as AC Ripple, and that requires more circuitry\components to filter it out. Thus when a manufacturer makes a "budget" supply the quality of the power isnt going to be the same even though its claimed capacity might be, that isnt immdiately evident to an end user.

Of course those manufactuers want to sell supplies and know that power quality isnt really a primary concern to most of the end users provided it actually can run a computer. So they incorporate bells and whistles like finish, displays, modular cables, windows, sleeving, UV reactive coatings ect. Inorder to attract end users, but those things cost money as well, so guess where the "value engineering" occurs most of the time? In the quality of the components or the complexity of the design that ensures better load regulation (how tightly the voltage is maintained) the transient response (how quickly the PSU reacts to a a change in the draw on the supply) and the AC Ripple. Now those parameters are set forth in the Spec, (ATX12V) for load regulation its 5%, and for AC Ripple its 50mV > 120mV p-p (peak to peak) depending on which rail (voltage) is being measured

So inorder to look like they are comparative the books need to get cooked
one way to do that is to artificially limit the acceptable VAC the power coming from your wall being Voltage Alternating Current. Your utility spikes and brownsout your power more than most appreciate, further simply having a heavy motor on the same house circuit can do the same (say a washer dryer or refrigerator) if a supply has a wide VAC rating it means that its able to maintain load regulation even when the VAC sags. But many manufacturers will limit that spec to a much tighter range so that they look comparative.

Next temperature plays a big role in two "end user" perceived triggers
the first is watts, the total capacity of a power supply is actually a determined when it all said and done by the temperature, its what is known as a derating curve, as the temperature increases the maximum power its capable of decreases, related to that is the second "trigger" noise. Fan noise is directly tied alot of the time these days to the operating temperature, so

by testing a supply at an artifically low temperature (typically the open workbench ambient of 21 or 25C per Intel certification specs) you get an unrealistic rating, why is it unrealistic? Because when that cert was originally assembled we didnt have the same firebreathing monsters we do today, and the PSU has traditionally exhausted the whole case, so now you have PSU more often than not directly exhausting the CPU heatsink at temperature (depending on how hot the initial air put into the heatsink is) upweard of 40>50C

How does a manufacturer develop a bad rep?
Simply stated they promise the stars and when some poor slob actually beleives them and adds far too much load to a supply for a given range of temperature things go very very wrong.
Supposedly supplies have "safety systems" that keep the PSU from allowing a catastrophic surge through the compoinents when they blow, but as I mentioned above designing a SMPS isnt nearly as easy as it would seem, they are prone to all sorts of instabilities and value engineering components especially say midway through a production run to save costs leads to problems, as does keeping up quality control and assembly standards.

In short provided your able to do a little mental windage when looking at the features and the specs
you get what you pay for

Testing:
the problem here is that crap supplies are pretty easy to spot, but once you get past those its very difficult without some pretty expensive components to actually stress test a PSU upto what could reasonable occur to an end user, say a hot summer room with summer induced power surges and brownouts from the utility and a marathon gaming session

thus the best that can be said about end user reviews, and just as importantly 99% of enthusiasts reviews is that it didnt blow up their computer that day

there are some notable exceptions, but to fully test a PSU takes about (no joke) $100,000 stack of electronics test equipment. The reviewers that at least know thier ass from a hole in the ground have assembled the most important components or reasonable facimilies of them to test the more important chracteristics of a PSU.

The leading reviewers are

Oleg Artamonov @ Xbit Labs
Lee RoboTech Garbutt @ Various
Mike Chin @ SPCR
our own jonnyGURU @ SLCentral

and even they dont "publish" stress testing though they do sometimes do it
the victims often being anonymous so they dont piss a manufacturer off considering thier "test" was "atypical and unfair"
but that is exactly what it would take to seperate out the wheat from the chaff in the upper end of supplies.

My recommendation is always the same, invest in infrastructure, get a good UPS it will make any PSU a stronger link in the chain, and get as good a PSU as you can afford, compared to other components even the most expensive are cheap

Id add that these days if your going to keep on the bleeding edge, get a PSU that is adaptable between the ATX12V and EPS12V spec for compatibility (compatibility is connections, while the number of +12V rails ect is compliance to a spec, strick compliance isnt always necessary) the rumor is that ATX12V will be adopting the 8 pin +12V auxillary connection form the EPS12V spec, much like it did the split +12V rail and the 24pin connector in the last major revison
 
The more knowledgable people in this forum could tell you several models that are light years better than either of those for similar prices.

I wish I could help you out personally, but I built a new computer a couple months ago, so i've fallen behind on the PSU knowledge.

Read the PSU selection sticky. Just because its on sale doesn't mean its worth it.
 
l0cke said:
okay the first psu is the one that came with my case
http://www.xoxide.com/mge-400w-psu.html

And the second is this aspire one that I got on sale.
http://www.xoxide.com/500waassuuvr.html

Don't tell me "don't use either, they suck" because that is spam. And spamming is bad.

So which one is more relibile? I don't think MGE is on the bad list, but it's louder then the aspire and doesn't have fan control.
Click to expand...

Well, the opinion/judgment "don't use either, they suck" is NOT spam. The findings that both of the brands that you have are on the BAD list are largely based on actual testing, and are compiled in the thread PSU's to Avoid for High Performance or OC'ed Systems:

Some of these PSU's are dangerous to your system, some are just sub-standard,
however NONE can be recommended, for high performance or over-clocked systems.

Achieve
Aerocool
Allied
Apex
Arrow,
Aspire > Dangerous! They don't even pretend to meet the ATX/AMD/Intel specs!
Austin
Codegen
Coolmax
Demon
Deer
Duro
Dynapower
Eagle
EagleTech
Foxconn
Foxlink
Hercules
InWin (except FSP models)
JustPC
Key Mouse
Kingwin
L&C
Logic
Linkworld
Macron Power
MGE
Mustang
Okia
Power-Man (except FSP models)
Powmax
Power-Up
Powerstar
QMax
Qtec
q-tec
Raidmax (except Topower/Tagan models, not sold with cases)
Real PC Power
Rhycon
Robanton
Rosewill
Skyhawk
Thermaltake (except the Thermaltake W0057 PurePower 500W)
TMP-ANS
Tsunami
Turbo
Turbolink
Ultra (except X2 & X-Finity)
US-Can
Viomax

Some of these PSU's are dangerous to your system, some are just sub-standard,
however NONE can be recommended, for high performance or over-clocked systems.
Click to expand...
 
Well, hopefully the Aspire/MGE PSU is temporary, as his WTB thread indicates that he is looking for a good power supply. :rolleyes:
 
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