Digital Wanderer

   So [cut] calls me recently. And with a slightly baffled voice she tells me about how her computer keeps freezing. I couldn't just leave a girl in distress, so I rushed over to the rescue immediately. The symptoms were as follows:
the PC freezes, then refuses to turn on and pitifully beeps like this: "trrrrrrrrrrr", which means a rapid succession of tiny little beeps.

   Naturally, the first thing I do is look at the motherboard manual. But the Chinese (Taiwanese) consider us to be dumb end-users and therefore do not provide a decryption of the computer's wailing. I had to stomp back home to scavenge through Google, even though I had already formed some hypotheses by that time. And on the net, the only mention I found was that a PC can make such a sound when there are problems with RAM. However, it was immediately clear that this wasn't the case, because the PC in question is already 2 years old, and the problems started a week ago.

   I accepted problems with the motherboard or the power supply unit as the most likely hypothesis. Ultimately, I took apart my own rig, which is stuffed with fairly high-quality components, pulled out the power supply, the memory, and the video adapter, and brought them over to test. As I had expected, despite the characteristic sound, the problem wasn't the memory. Fortunately, it wasn't the motherboard either — because after swapping the power supply from the Chinese piece of crap to my INWIN IW300-A, everything fired up and worked like a charm.

   In connection with this, I remembered the following. I am a proponent of choosing everything high-quality, albeit not too financially burdensome whenever possible. But I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who flat out do not understand why one should buy high-quality components, and consider it a waste of money. "It works just fine as is, so why pay more?"

   So I'll answer like this. A few years ago, I had 2 hard drives burn out in a row. Luckily, they were replaced under warranty back then, but I lost a fair bit of my data. And now, after reading dozens of forum pages, I understand that the most likely culprit was a killer PSU produced by the hellish outfit CODEGEN, which mass-produces extra-cheap knockoffs of ultra-low quality. After two years of service, this unit safely and neatly burned to a crisp. Just like, by the way, the identical unit of my college classmate Inessa.

   If you do a search on the forums or ask a repairman, you can observe an endless number of such cases with cheap, low-quality power supplies. It's a good thing if, during their demise, these devices don't drag a bunch of other computer parts down into the grave with them, which also happens quite often.

   I was also told about a case where, due to power surges, the PSU burned out along with the motherboard. And this happened twice in a row. Word on the street is that with a high-quality PSU, it would have ended with just the PC shutting down, or the breakdown of only the PSU itself.

   In the end, I made a strong-willed decision not to treat the Chinese patient, since it was mortally broken from the moment of its creation. Instead, I decided to put my PSU in the girl's PC, and buy a new one for myself — a more powerful one, with some headroom for the future, in which, as we know, multi-core processors and cabinets full of disk arrays await us, consuming power like your typical iron.

   With the help of three hours of reconnaissance on Hobot and searching on Google in Latvia, it turned out that the only decent PSUs you can buy in our province are produced by FSP GROUP (also known as FORTRON/SOURCE). Unfortunately, either the models weren't the ones I wanted, or there was no trust in the company selling the PSU (although in general, the situation with this here is good — the companies are quite reliable and responsible).
   Eventually, I found FSP-produced units in the price list of an excellent outfit called Jet Computer, but without the exact models specified. One email — and I already have the necessary info, but for some reason without the price. Such are the local quirks. But for once in a blue moon, they wrote it without using translit and with proper grammar. Usually, you get a mishmash of Latin letters and numbers, with no capital letters at the beginning of sentences and no punctuation marks.
   However, it was a Saturday, and therefore they sent me the reply only on Monday. But I sneakily read it right during a lecture from my mobile phone via the Gmail mobile service, and was very pleasantly surprised by a good price. So I didn't dawdle, but just went right away and bought it.

And the moral of the story is this.
   Buy high-quality products, citizens. I'm not campaigning for the heavyweights like ANTEC or ENERMAX, which cost $100 for 300Watts. But just for PSUs from respectable brands. Namely: Delta, FSP, with some caveats InWIN or Sirtech(HPC). Just like my FSP400-60THN-P.
   It features: compliance with the ATX 12V 2.01 standard, two independent 12-volt rails, a fairly quiet 12-centimeter diameter fan, and passive power factor correction (PFC). Plus a 24-pin connector for newer PCs, while still coming with an adapter in the box. And finally — long wires, 1 SATA drive power connector, and an honest 400 watts of total power. All while costing $45.
   For the nightmarish Codegen PSUs going for $25 and other similar "Chinese" knockoffs, 400 watts on the label equals a real 200 or 250, plus the poor quality of the parts and the risk of losing a PC worth an order of magnitude more.
Do you really need that?

Related links
The PSU section on ixbt