I've read that ticking is common with sleeve bearing fans because of the thrust washers. I've heard it from several of mine, but pulling the fan the label side silenced it for months. Don't do this without unplugging the power cord first because there's lots of exposed high voltage inside the PSU, i...

Don't the fans in an unmodded Antec normally run at pretty low voltage anyway? My really old Powmax (Leadman) has its fan speed regulated by nothing but a 50 ohm thermistor in series with one of the wires and stuck inside the output filter donut coil that handles the +5.0V. I have a 300W Antec that'...

Could some of the duds be due to circuit board shorts? The wires on their boards are bent over, and some seem to come very close to touching adjacent wires or copper foils. In fact my first Antec was one thrown out by someone else. It seemed dead except for the standby power, and because I couldn't ...

I have a 350W, and it's about as quiet as an Antec. Maybe the fan is dirty or has developed a bad bearing.

300W ATX Powmax: 6 years
250W AT Enermax: 8 years

The Powmax was made before the Taiwan capacitor scandal broke and before the manufacturer cheapened their designs.

Makes me wonder, how difficult is it to engineer some form of surge protection into components? Install the missing parts in the empty spots on the circuit board? I've seen even moderately priced PSUs with a couple of empty spots labelled MOVx or Zx, indicating that surge protectors were meant to g...

Every time I've found a blown fuse, I've found something else blown, too, usually the high voltage transistors. Fortunately the transistors and diodes are usually cheap and common, and replacements probably don't need to be exactly the same but just be the same general type with adequate ratings (vo...

A friend of mine recently found a bulging capacitor in his TruePower 330W or 380W, and several months ago I found two of them in my old 300W SmartPower. In both cases the brand of capacitor was Fuhjyyu.

They have some surge protection in the form of the AC line filter (primarily for preventing the computer & PSU from interfering with radio & TV), consisting of a couple of coils and boxy plastic capacitors, either on the main circuit board or a small board or sealed metal container on the power cord...

Assuming that all the ratings are accurate, it means that you can simultaneously run the +5V and +3.3V rails of the 350W closer to their max amp ratings. But the information I have says that a typical system that powers the CPU from the +12V rail consumes roughly 66% of its power from this rail.

I have a PSU that does that, but I can't figure out why because isn't it enough for the fan to speed up when the PSU gets hotter (which this PSU does as well)?

I noticed that you left the power cord plugged into the PSU even with the cover removed. Is that safe, considering all the exposed high voltage inside, sometimes even on one of the heatsinks? I have an older Powmax, built like a better Raidmax, and the heatsink next to the big high voltage capacitor...

www.jameco.com lists ltos of them, but they're probably a lot cheaper if they're surplus, such as from www.bgmicro.com, www.marlinpjones.com, or www.allelectronics.com.

I make my ducts out of polyproplyene, the material that translucent food containers and storage boxes are made of. It can't be glued, so I weld it together with a soldering iron.

In Antecs, the heatsink next to the biggest capacitors is live, at about 170 VDC, and even if it wasn't, you wouldn't ever want to connect it to the other heatsink -- apparently PSU designers are paranoid about isolating the high voltage side from the low voltage side. At the very least, I wouldn't ...

http://www.tech-mods.net/modules.php?name=Reviews&file=viewreview&id=21 indicates that HiPro = SPI = Fortron/Sparkle, which is a good sign, but I'm not sure if it's true because the UL number, E143709, is different (but it's also true that Antecs have their own UL numbers rather than use Channel Wel...

C'T magazine said that XP2400+ systems with a GeForce3 Ti500 drew about 2A @ +12V, 18A @ +5.0V, and 13A @ +3.3V if they used +12V for CPU power, 9A @ 12V, 3A @ +5.0V, and 10A @ +3.3V when the CPU ran from the +5.0V rail. I measured 60W for my 466 MHz Celeron system (5400 RPM HD, integrated graphics)...

The stock heatsink with the high voltage transistors on it may be at high voltage even if the transistors are electrically insulated from it. I read somewhere that this is done to ground out EMI without making a direct connection to earth ground, in case the PSU is operated without a ground connecti...

I think that the prime causes of failure for PSUs under light load are seized fans and bad capacitors, and apparently old AT PSUs had better capacitors that were probably Japanese. I've come across only two bad AT PSUs, one made so cheap that its heatsinks were made of thin steel, another an Enermax...

Do companies submit regular production models to the safety agencies, or do they submit superior units that are especially prepared by their engineers and then mass produce inferior ones? I once read that the latter was done by some generic PC makers in order to pass FCC emissions tests.

My Antec's fan spins at around 900 RPM with no load (tested outside the PSU) and hasn't gone above 2000 RPM after prolonged use inside the computer. If this is a dual-fan Antec, you can manipulate the thermistors through the opening of the top fan, but before doing this unplug the power cord because...

You could attach a capacitor across a resistor (or one of leg of a potentiometer) to cause a temporarily short at start-up. I do this across thermistors of fan speed-temperature controllers.

Is it something that can be fixed with new capacitors? My 300W SmartPower, about the same age, has recently developed capacitor rot. At first I thought it was limited to just one cap (all measured for ESR), but a few weeks later another cap swelled up and showed much higher ESR than it did a week ea...

I recently bought 300W and 350W Antec SmartPower PSUs and found that they include a second thermistor, labelled RTH3, not found in older versions of these models. It's located between almost exactly in the center of the circuit board, between the power transformer and the low voltage heatsink, next ...

Could the fan controller chip on the mobo have gotten zapped? I've read that they're not protected against shorts or overloads. I noticed that whenever I've connected a different color wire to the original one, I've always gotten into trouble. And whenever I'm not sure where a signal wire is suppose...

i still haven't come across a psu with live heatsinks The ones I've seen were in a Powmax (much better than those made now), Delta, Antec SmartPower, and an Enermax EG365P-VD. I believe that except for the Powmax, all the transistors were insulated from the heatsink. I worry about the insulators fa...

The ones I've seen were all little green plastic lumps and located near the big heatsink with the low voltage diodes on it (closest to all the power wires that go to the computer). But in one PSU it was located under a piece of aluminum that clamped against the diode and had a little pocket for the ...

You do realize that swapping out fans and modding of any electrical component in your computer voids it's UL listing? A new fan will void the UL listing but probably won't really change anything, unlike a PSU water cooling mod. I know I sound like a broken record on the subject of water cooling, bu...

I have a Sparkle brand ATX-300GT, which should be identical to your Aopen, but I didn't blip up to 0.5V after I turned it off with either the front panel button or the switch on the rear, at least not for 30 seconds. I tested it only while it was connected to the mobo (ECS P4S5A2 -- doesn't use +12V...

Do you really want to risk your life with a non-UL approved water-cooled PSU?