Powermac wrote:

Bob Larter wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
bob wrote:

having a old boat anchor disk drive laying around to use as a dummy
load helps.....

Not a bad idea.

Remember the Full Height 5 1/4's ? They took about 30-40 W.

I used to own several ST-506s & ST-412s. Long gone now, of course.

I still have a few Seagate 9GB 5.25" FH SCSI drives in external boxes
for my old AVID capture setups. I keep them around because they still
work and are OEM to the systems.

Unfortunately we had Micropolis 9 GB drives for Lightworks that had a fatal
manufacturing error that consigned them all to scrap after a year or two.


The problem I see with most PS supplies are cheap parts that fail when
the fans cooling them get clogged up with cig smoke or pet hair, dust,
etc. That and buying one that is too small for the load you are
applying.

I have one ancient PC ( my old DOS box ) I've replaced the fan in twice.
Bearing failure, nothing else.


How did DELL and eMachines get away with small 250W max rated supplies
in P4 3Ghz+ and Athlon 64 3000+ systems? if you added a decent gaming
video card and an extra HD you probably had voltage issues.

Probably because they are *real* watts. The Asian ones are somewhat
optimistic.

Graham