PC frustrations

[dgarrison123]

Well I just start building my own custom PC in Jan. 09, and just finished it wednesday of this week. Everthing had been running great for these 3 Days untill now. I had been saving money, and just buying parts when I was able too. Well about 2 hours ago my PSU fried. I herd a sizzle and a pop. Then a dead screen. I just hope it did take any thing else with it. I have about 1600 tied up in it, and for those 3 days it was great. I had it hooked up to my 32" LCD running in 720p. Watching snakebytes.tv was alot better in HD. The PSU had a 3 year warrenty. So now I have to wait till 9 to get a RMA number. They will charge me for a new one and ship it out, and refund me when they get the dead one. This sucks I wait 10 months to get my dream machine running and it last three days. This just really makes me want to say bad things all day. And just think of all the BPs I could've had instead. Sorry I just needed to vent.

And if anyone is interested in specs on the PC I'll post them.

[Samuel]

I am interested.

[dgarrison123]

Asus M3A78 Motherboard
AMD athlon 64 X2 Black ed. 5400 2.8
XFX GeForce 9800 GTX + 512MB PCIe w/Dual Link DVI
HITACHI 1TB SERIAL ATA HD 7200/16MB/SATA-3G
Lite ON 24X DVDRW SATA w/Lightscribe
Thermaltake Armor Series VA8003BWS Black Full Tower Case w/ 25CM Fan
OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
Ultra X3 850 watt PSU
This is the danger den cooling products i had on
Copper TDX AM2 Block for AMD Processor
DD12V-D5 Pump Variable Speed by Laing
Black Ice GTX480 radiator w/3 fans
Fillport Reservoir
1/2 ID tubing
Feser one cooling fluid
Windows vista ultimate 64 Ed.

Idle temp 29 degrees cel.
Load temp 32 degrees cel

[spitfireashlea]

Ah..........haha.......I see your problem........haha..........Everything seems to be fine, except one final flaw. You'll see it.....Read the list again. It's compatibility. It was a nice setup, till you added this. haha.......haha............ha..........Let me know when you see it lol.

[Darkice]

Windows vista

[m00kfu]

Did your psu have a high enough rating to cover the power needs of all the components?

[Samuel]

Did your psu have a high enough rating to cover the power needs of all the components?

just looking at the list, yes it did/does. I think the issue is not the rating, but the quality. Ultra is known to be spotty with their PSUs .. some work awesome, and some fail bad. The one thing I tell people when they are building PCs is the one area to never skimp on is PSU.

Different manufacturers rate their PSU differently too. Some of the ratings are peak, not constant. You need to understand all of that when picking out a PSU.

[dgarrison123]

Im thinking that it did on the 12 volt side it could handle 64 amps.

If your talking about the windows vista being the flaw, well i would've went with XP ,but if I recall right XP can only read up 3GB of ram.

[dgarrison123]

just looking at the list, yes it did/does. I think the issue is not the rating, but the quality. Ultra is known to be spotty with their PSUs .. some work awesome, and some fail bad. The one thing I tell people when they are building PCs is the one area to never skimp on is PSU.

Different manufacturers rate their PSU differently too. Some of the ratings are peak, not constant. You need to understand all of that when picking out a PSU.

Well I didn't think I was cheap on the PSU I read some reviews and there was little to none bad reviews at the time of purchase. The PSU was like $190 at the time. Well I'm going to send it in under warrenty, if this one becames bad, is there any PSU that you would recomend?

[Samuel]

Well I didn't think I was cheap on the PSU I read some reviews and there was little to none bad reviews at the time of purchase. The PSU was like $190 at the time. Well I'm going to send it in under warrenty, if this one becames bad, is there any PSU that you would recomend?

Like I said, Ultra is known for their hits and misses. Some of their newest ones have been getting better .. still not something I would put into one of my builds (well, serious builds. I am thinking about building a file server ... and I don't care what goes in there.) I know what you are talking about, review being positive is a really great sign. Maybe you just got yourself a lemon. It happens, I mean my motherboard is down right now ... some are just bad apples.

If you end up getting another bad one .. the brands I would recommend (due to reviews, personal experience, and friends experiences) are Corsair TX series, PC Power & Cooling, and SeaSonic (Corsairs OEM). I have 6 HDDs, 2 DVD burners, 1 GTX 285 and a Core i7 all running on a PCP&C Silencer 750 Quad (LINK). It has never once faltered, though if I were to add anything else I would not feel comfortable without moving up a power level (1000w at least) ... but this thing is SUPER strong and is rated for 750 constant.