co-worker (30 years of computer repair experience) that your *never ever*
cheap out on power supplies. And crappy cases almost always come with
crappy power supplies. This is expecially true for a team like that one
that would have to have constant operation.
Crappy power supplies can cause flaky performance in innumerable ways
relating to CPU and motherboard operation, as well as drive operation.
I have to back Lucas up on this one, and can't stress it enough. In one form
or another over the past few years I've been involved in mathematical
computing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Apart from one of the first
Gateway P-120 motherboards (which apparently had a known tendency to
overheat and Gateway were aware of it), an early US Robotics 28.8 modem
(which was lousy design) and a modem which was struck by lightning (forgot
to unplug the phone cord), the only hardware component to have failed has
been power supplies. I'm currently on my fourth power supply in 2 years on
my current machine.
When the power supply fails, I have been fortunate and not had any permanent
damage to other hardware components, mainly because voltage regulators tend
to be quite robust components and, even in a failure, don't let much more
than 3.3V or 5.0V hit the board. (Though exploding capacitors in the power
supply *will* blank the CMOS). However a power supply is notoriously full of
very poor, very cheap components. It is the 10c resistor, or 50c smoothing
capacitor that fails - not very comforting when you may have thousands of
dollars of hardware hanging off it. People who drive sports cars don't use
the cheapest gasoline...
It seems lately though that component quality is decreasing. AT power
supplies seemed pretty indestructable, but ATX power supplies are much
weaker. John Pierce is right, a $59 case isn't bad - I could have got the
latest power supply without a case for $48. Resist the temptation though to
go to a high street store and pick up a cheap power supply for $30... and
believe me, a spare power supply you have hanging around, or a reconditioned
one is *not* an option.
It's not worth spoiling the ship for a ha-penny of tar... if you're building
a decent system, don't try to save a few bucks on a power supply. A good
brain is useless if the heart stops. I'm reminded of the Russian guy in
"Armageddon" - "American components, Russian components... all made in
Taiwan!".
Chris Nash
Lexington KY
UNITED STATES
===
Co-discoverer of probably the 8th and 11th largest known primes.
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