RE: Star Wars Power Supply

My experience with the switchers is first the fan fails, then the supply
dies in sympathy. Sort of a mutual suicide pact. The best supplies that we
found were "Jaba" brand (really!), they had the best fans...

Check with the IS tech folks, they should be able to advise as to the best
current switchers.

John :-#)#

At 09:16 AM 8/17/99 -0700, you wrote:

> > Somewhere along the
> > line someone got the notion that switchers were more reliable than linear
> > power supplies, and that's just not true.
> >
>I'll just toss my $0.02 in here now. I think the quality of PC power
>supplies has gone down pretty fast over the years. (trying to stay ahead on
>the price/performance curve) I have a lot of those old 62.5W PC/XT power
>supplies that I use for games and projects and have never had a bad one.
>Compare that with those little 230W "mini-tower" switchers which I've
>personally had about 4 those die in the last year or two. (We too have a
>power-supply grave-yard cubicle at work. ;-) Maybe big Pentium systems with
>massive HD's, RAM, and power-hungry 3D cards contribute to their demise, but
>I've seen a lot of touch-screen '486 motherboard based games with those
>little mini-tower guys croak too.
>
>On the other hand, switchers can supply pretty massive current in a small
>space, and I've routinely been able to get them for about $15 *with* a
>mini-tower case (which I consider a fancy shipping carton and toss in the
>trash ;-) so when one dies I just pop in a new one and don't really worry
>about trying to fix anything. (Although everyone assures me that switchers
>are easy to fix...)
>
> > Linear supplies produce quiter voltages, which, leads to, among
> > other things, nicer sounding audio when you run amps off of them. No amp
> > has an infinite PSRR, so when you hit it with the horrendous supply
> > voltages that switchers produce (I'm no expert on switching supplies, but
> > I think they switch at around 20 kHz, which gives you nice noise right at
> > the "annoying edge" of the audio band) you'll get some distortion.
> >
>I agree that switchers for PC's are pretty noisy, but that's not true of all
>switchers. We did a redundant, hot-swappable supply for a rack-mount modem
>system a few years back-- those switchers were really quiet and pretty
>bullet-proof. Of course I think there were some *caps* that cost $15 in
>those, much less getting the whole supply for that much! ;-)
>
>-Clay
>
> >

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Received on Tue Aug 17 20:00:53 1999