I bought a used dual-1.25 MDD about a year-and-a-half ago from a
college in Washington state, and it arrived with a dead PSU. After
checking prices for replacement PSUs (from $150-$500, at the time), I
did a lot of googling and reading about the situation. Among other
things, I learned that the 400-watt PSU was the original PSU for this
CPU, and the 360-watter was the replacement offered by Apple when the
original started dying like flies; as it turns out, the 360 wasn't
much of an improvement. The real problem was (is) just a very bad
original design, probably forced by trying to fit two GHz+ processors
into a case designed for one 350 MHz chip.
To cut to the chase, and as Dan and Ted suggest, I decided to invest
in a very-good quality 350-watt ATX PC PSU ($50 from Newegg), though
it took a bit of looking to find one that would fit the MDD case. I
rewired the harness myself - all it requires is patience and minimal
soldering skills. True enough, if you go this route, you'll not be
able to use Apple displays (unless you add a separate 28-volt PSU
brick) - but as I have no Apple displays nor plan to get any, it's not
an issue for me. So far, I've had not one second of trouble from this
arrangement - none of the very common power-up problems endemic to the
MDDs. I strongly urge anyone who experiences PSU problems with their
MDDs to just bite the bullet and replace the Apple PSU with a generic
PC ATX PSU: Much cheaper and much more reliable than the Apple-only
fixes.
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