Why you dont use cheap PSUs

Bigbacon

Fully [H]
Joined
Jul 12, 2007
Messages
21,249
Finally lost one. Computer boots but reset randomly. Try to mine, instant reset. Tried it on another computer, it woukdnt even boot. Down one miner

It was an aprevia 500watt thing. Guess i will grab a cheap 500 watt evga psu to go along with all the other cheap evga psus :)

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This regional voltage selector, it is the definition of it production date.
Cheap and very old technology = disaster 😄

If this was a TAGAN TG430-U22 ? this would be still alive.
 
Cheap is relative. Almost al of my mining was done on supermicro pws-563-1h20. They are 560w and can be ran at or in some cases above that for continuous periods. I have yet to kill one and have ran over 50 of them. Before that I killed a hx1050 and ax750 which are both decent supplies. I bought the supermicro for ~$10 each.

Cheap consumer stuff is to be avoided.
 
So far the most dangerous thing for me has been powering risers and GPUs with different PSUs. I've heard that if the server PSUs fail they can take out your GPUs while ATX ones will shutoff safely but not sure on that. It didn't damage anything did it?
 
Almost every rig I run is a dual PSU setup, never an issue with them as long as you don't mix and match riser/gpu power sources. I have had had two total psu failures though, without any rig/gpu damage. One was some off brand piece of shit "mining" psu, (I knew was a time bomb). Likely a cap that popped, and when it failed, it tripped the breaker on the entire PDU it was on. Luckily nothing damaged on any connected rigs.

The other was a platinum HP server PSU. It was a used pull from an ebay liquidator, ran it for 5 mins, then the rig tripped a breaker (running well below its rated amperage). Did some investigating, plugged the PSU in by itself, and the thing nearly caught on fire. Apparently these don't have any (or very poor) overcurrent/short protection, like you mentioned. Pretty paranoid after that one now, but at the same time, Ive run dozens of other server psu's for years without issue.

I will add though, there is one pretty big issue with running server PSU's as a secondary PSU. If you don't trigger the server PSU with the main psu (on and off), you can burn up cards. In a situation where the server PSU is on, but the primary supply loses power (or is off), the server psu will keep feeding gpu's power but the fans won't spin without a pcie trigger from the motherboard. Learned this the hard way when I accidentally left a server psu on, overheating/killing an rx470. Pretty much every AMD card Ive run is like this, and won't spin the gpu fans without a pcie trigger (haven't tested rdna2, though).

Nvidia does a much better job with this, usually. On most nvidia cards, if they have voltage but no pcie trigger from the motherboard, they just run the fans at 100% until they see a connection/trigger from the pcie slot/motherboard. Once you power the primary PSU and the motherboard comes on, the bios settings take over fan control normally.

Yeah, I had a HP PSU go out recently. I must've caught it just in time as I walked into the room because my 6800 was smoking. The other 6800 I had connected to the same PSU is fine though, so I'm still not sure if it is the card or the PSU. That made me paranoid so I used two seasonic PSUs on another rig but that one had a 3060ti just go out and the PSU wouldn't turn on, but after removing the bad card the others are fine and the PSU still tests good so I'm not sure on that one either.
 
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