Recommendation request for the PSU experts

[Jawawithagun]

Just a few minutes ago my desktop's PSU blew. Sparks, thunder, the whole shebang, including kicking out the house's main fuse.

So of course, needing a new one, I come here asking for recommendations.

The old PSU was a 380W Tagan and the new one should be fairly quiet. I'm running an Athlon64 and a passively cooled GeForce6600 on an AsRock 939SLI32-eSATA2 board. Nothing fancy or high-end, so I won't be needing and fancy high-powered thing full of pretty lights.


Any suggestions?

[starslayer]

If you don't mind getting something a bit spendy, get a Seasonic X-400FL. No fan, excellent efficiency, five-year warranty, etc. It's very expensive for a 400W supply, though (~$140 in the US). If 80 Plus Gold efficiency and total silence isn't worth that much to you, something from Antec or Corsair should be good, and about a third of the price.

[Ypoknons]

Try reading JohnnyGuru, it's a good resource for PSUs. Though I don't really know much about low/mid-range GPUs, though I think the Seasonic fanless is overkill, even the Seasonics with fans are quiet as the fans don't spin up until the power requirements ramp up. Silent PC Review is also good resource.

[Jawawithagun]

Thanks, I'll have a look.
I'm not quite prepared to spend that amount of money on a PSU and I really don't need a fanless one. I don't want to run the PC 24/7 beside my bed.

[White Haven]

In my experience as a professional technician, Antec power supplies don'y fail any more often than other worthwhile brands but when they do go out, they have an uncomfortably high chance of blowing other hardware out when they do. Even worse, they tend to keep blowing hardware. I've had more than one Antec PSU that blew a test motherboard after (apparently) blowing the original board in the first place. They make great cases, but I absolutely do not trust their power supplies. Corsair is good, Cooler Master is good, Thermaltake is good, Enermax, PC Power and Cooling, so on and so forth...but not Antec.

[phongn]

It depends on where Antec sourced that particular PSU from; they've had some bad ones in the past (TruePower, I'm looking at you). They've since cleaned up their act fairly well.

I'll echo the suggestions for Seasonic - and they have plenty of other PSUs that are not nearly as expensive as their fanless designs.