PC Power

PC Power and Cooling is dead

12-04-2010

Below you will see my praise of the PC Power and Cooling brand. Fact is it was the best of the best for many years. THEN the company was sold to OCZ the same bunch that makes so many other products. I hoped they would continue the high standards of PC Power and Cooling but it seems they have not. So based mostly on the below review I am afraid I can no longer support their products. I am not sure what I am going to do for a PSU from now on but I never used to have to worry. As long as it said PC Power and Cooling I could buy with confidence. No longer I am afraid. I have been told that Seasonic used to make the PSU's for PC Power and Cooling so I will probably be looking into those. But no more PC Power and Cooling for me. It is a sad day.

This review was written by the guys over at HardOCP. They are one of my trusted sites that I frequent from time to time.

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 950w PSU Review.

There was a day when you could go out and buy just about any old power supply for a computer and get away with it. Yah once in a while one would fail and it would get chalked off as an oh well run down and pick up another $29 supply and install and off the machine would go. Well systems are making more and more demands on the power supply and you no longer can get away with some of the junk, yes I said junk, that is manufactured today.

I found this out a few years ago when I started building Xeon systems and an ASUS motherboard called a PC-DL. The PC-DL is a dual Xeon motherboard that, in my opinion, has a rather inadequately designed voltage regulator system. This causes the system to draw a LOT of power. When a bunch of us enthusiasts started building these machines we had lots of problems that we couldn't figure out. Little problems to big (no boot at all) problems. It took a while but I finally stumbled onto the cause. Power supplies were not holding up. Some supplies would boot the machine for a while then the machine would just quit. Blank screen, no boot, sometimes even smoke! 

I had one machine that had been running for 3 months no problem. I only installed one CPU as I didn't have a match for it. Well finally I got the matching CPU and decided to install it. I shut down the machine, put in the new CPU and turned on the power. Nothing, nada, no lights, no sound, nothing. This really puzzled me. It had run flawlessly for 3 months. Well I kept removing hardware trying to isolate what was causing the problem. I got all the way down till I had no video card and no ram installed. It still wouldn't fire up. I removed the new CPU and it still wouldn't. I scratched my head (hence the reason I am now bald... too many of these troubleshooting problems) fooled around for a few, smoked a cigarette and finally decided to try a new power supply. I put in one I had on the shelf and VIOLA she came right up! I kept adding hardware till I had the machine back to full and she ran perfect. That's when I found that the wrong supply causes many unexplained and weird problems. I went to the 2cpu.com forums and talked with some of the others there and someone came up with the conclusion that we needed a minimum of 30a on the 12v rail. Since changing to single rail psu's with a minimum 30a 12v rails I have not had hardly a problem with any of these machines. Multirail PSU's are the ones that have more than one +12v rail. At one point 9 machines ran here full load 24 hours 7 days a week folding with no component failures. Quite a record and I owe it all to buying good PSU's!

Now as far as I know the PC-DL is the only board that really stretched the PSU's. I am sure there are a few others but this one taught me the lesson. Most people don't think about their PSU. Oh yah a few do and buy one of those 10 rail 96a per rail jobs that advertise to do everything and can power locomotives, run your coffee maker, and at the same time light your house. Well all that is just advertising crap! Trust me its all advertising hype. The truth of the matter is there isn't a multirail PSU out there that I trust to put out good power.  You know the whole reason to build and sell multirail PSU's? They are cheaper to build! that's it in a nutshell. Here is an article by PC Power and Cooling about the myths of multirail PSU's. Read #8 and pay attention to it as it will save you a lot of grief and money if you take the advice.

Course that is just my opinion but it is based on a lot of testing and burning of computers on my part. I learned my lesson... now please don't make the same mistake I did. You might say well PC Power and Cooling is just trying to sell their supplies. They have a vested interest in saying all this. I say that anything the folks at PC Power and Cooling tells me I am going to believe. They have made the best PSU's in the world since back in the late 80's when I first found out about them. They are a bit expensive but they are still the best. Search around the net for any PSU reviews that include a PC Power and Cooling in the test. You will always be amazed at how much better they are than everyone else. Of course using the best components and best design is not cheap. But think of this, how much time and money is involved when the PSU burns up a brand new $300 video card, or motherboard, or some other component? Spend an extra 50 or 100 bucks and get something you never will have to worry about again!

Now why all this when we are supposed to be talking about a video card. In my two day search I read countless reports of machines running a few minutes to a few hours and then crashing. One even had a strong burning odor coming from the PSU! Finally after reading some more I realized that in more than half these posts the PSU ended up being the problem. Some folks even RMA'd their board back to the manufacturer who replaced them. Then they reinstalled and it died again. They hadn't realized that it was the PSU that was being overloaded and then overheating the card burning out the components on it. Some even after being told they might change to another more powerful PSU still insisted it was a faulty card and that their 4 rail SLI certified PSU was new and could not be at fault. One guy returned his card got the new one and returned it also and had them replace it with another brand as he was sure all Sapphire cards were at fault.

The problem is this card needs a lot of power. Most people have never had a component that uses this much power before and really never stressed their power supply before. Some are just now waking up to the power supply problem. Don't you be one. You have been warned. Buy any single rail PSU you like that has a minimum of 30a on the 12v rail. For me I am heading to the 40a+ range from PC Power and Cooling. You can take your chances with the others.

Scary part is I am still reading all kinds of forum posts that say things like... I have an X brand 450W PSU with 15a on each rail and it is running fine! The trouble with this is ... the PSU is cranking out more amperage than it was designed to do seriously stressing the PSU. Yes it is working for the moment but sooner or later it will fail. Lets just hope it doesn't burn down these guys houses in the process. So just because someone says it works fine, please err on the side of caution.

On this card there are 2 4 pin molex connectors for power. Just like on a hard drive or DVD burner. Try to use two different lines coming from your PSU and not connected to anything else. IF you have to share these power lines try and share with very low power devices. I read where one guy couldn't get his card to work properly posting his symptoms for about 3 days then he found out he had to plug power into both those little white connectors on the end of the card.  Then his card worked fine. 

Oh and the reason I had so little problems installing my card was that I already had a 650w 12v/34a PSU in this machine. So I didn't notice a power problem.