Buckeneye;1131474; said:
Dont confuse PCI-X with PCI-Express my friend, they are two different standards.
Correct. My mistake in the way I wrote that, it should have been PCI
x, as in a wildcard to cover PCI-X and PCIe and so forth -- not the literal PCI-X standard.
Buckeneye;1131474; said:
@ Dryden
you NEVER use a pre-installed PSU unless its from a quality vendor ( Antec, NZXT, Thermaltake all have decent bundled units) I've seen time and time again 6 months down the road the thing shorts out taking half your components.
NEVER/
unless? Seems pretty simple: Don't buy junk cases. Problem solved. I won't disagree.
What I do disagree with is pissing ones' money away because they were told any case/PSU combo direct from the same vendor is shit, and if it costs less than $200 it's also shit. That is just not true.
I have been building PCs for 15 years, and 19 times out of 20 a specialty brand $75+ PSU is overkill for the run of the mill desktop computer. Unless you're running two video boards, two CD/DVD drives, and two or more hard drives, you're throwing your money away by buying these 600W and higher PSUs. Really, on the high end you're not even paying the extra money for the PSU ... you're really paying for the convenience of some extra detachable cables and a few neon lights.
These power supplies are placebos for most of the kids that buy them, nothing more.
In my build, I recommended an InWin case, which I think is perfectly fine for FCollins' needs.
InWin has been a highly regarded case manufacturer since the mid-90s. I have used nothing but InWin for myself and in both of my last two places of work for desktop PCs since around 1998. I have built maybe 200+ computers in InWin cases over the last decade using the standard InWin Powerman PSUs, this is going all the way back to the Powerman 230s that were in the A500 model cases. I've built, if I had to guess, maybe 50 PCs in the A500 case, and ALL OF THEM are still in service on their original PSUs. Both the cases and PSUs were winning awards from the likes of Toms Hardware and boot Magazine (later Maximum PC) in the late 90s and up through/to today.
Yes, a good PSU
is important. But buying one separate from the case for an extra $75 is not the sole way to evaluate whether the PSU is any good. There are several factory installed PSUs that are just fine for 99% of peoples' needs. Besides, many of them are made at the same factories and just relabeled based on the end-company's brand anyhow. After all, there are only a handful of companies in the world that have the technological capabilities to manufacture the hardware.
The bottom line is that maybe less than 1% of gamers, or workstation users at the extreme end need an extreme PSU, and we're only talking about scenarios where you need to power four+ hard drive RAID arrays and multiple video displays.
)
