[geeks] Of video cards and power supplies...

[Lionel Peterson]

On Jul 14, 2009, at 7:14 PM, Nadine Miller <velociraptor at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Jul 14, 2009, at 3:49 PM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> Personally, I would have avoided a PS by Corsair, my personal  
>> experience with Supermicro-supplied PS and Antec PS (both bundled  
>> with chassis and sold retail) have proven themselves as 'known Good  
>> Enough' PS and I stick to them whenever practical.
>
> The Corsair 850, 750, and 650 PSUs have been torture-tested by some  
> of the folks that use oscilloscopes to real output under load, and  
> high-temp ovens to bake them.  The consistently out-perform other  
> similarly priced PSUs which was their big selling point to me.

I would have never known this...

>  Antecs have not been doing so great of late, even though I've not  
> personally had any problems with them.  If I had more cash to spend,  
> I'd buy Seasonic.

My opinion is formed by my personal experience, and that amounts to a  
sample size of about 10-15 systems all told.

> Similarly, the reports of declining quality of SuperMicro and Asus  
> motherboards--both brands I've had good personal luck with--put me  
> off.

I don't use Asus (no good reason, just don't), and I see Supermicro  
going 'consumer' and trying to leverage their server background. Some  
of their products confuse me, like ATX server boards that only take 2x  
1 Gig RAM?

I still want to try their Atom server board...

> I don't plan on replacing my rig every other year like some folks,  
> so I did my homework on the PSU front, since it pretty much serves  
> the same function as the foundation of your house.

Agreed, my recent desktop purchase for home was an i7 Dell box, I'm  
about to build two identical budget Hyper-V servers to learn failover  
clustering...

Lionel