telkom pc

250 would be enoug if, and *only if*

1. The power supply is a high quality unit that can actually deliver 250w and sustain it - most power supplies don't even come close, the ones the Mecer ship most definitely dont.

2. Nothing is to be added afterwards.

My mom's Athlon is running off a 200W power supply, on dodgy power, and has been fine for the last three years (was a duron earlier on but I upgraded the box). That PSU, however, cost me close to a grand at the time - can't remember the brand though.

I have an Athlon 2400+ at home with nothing fancy really, 1 SATA disc, Low end radeon card, 2x RAM modules, soundblaster card and TV tuner. This runs fine of a 300W Thermaltake. But the Thermaltake replaced a handfull of 300W and evern 400W PSUs that didn't cope, even on stable power.
 
Interesting thing, sorry to go off topic. About a month ago a client phoned me with a HP Pavilion desktop that just died. Figured out quickly the PSU is dead, and seeing as they needed it for after hours traing with a trainer that had been flown in for the day, I offered to replace it for the day with a generic (think it was a 400W AOpen I happened to have with me). I warned them that the generic might not be strong enough for prolonged used, that by opening the box I would most definitely void the warrantee, and that the they should still have HP replace it with the proper HP part.

What struck me was quality of the HP power supply. Yes, I realise that's an ironic statement, seeing as it had just died, but you get duds with all brands, bear with me. It was a heavy unit (which normally speaks of good insides and cooling) and up to that day managed to stably power a Prescott core P4 with alots of extra goodies, on very unstable power. They simply wouln't buy a UPS like I told them to, so they ended up paying the price.

Anyway, yesterday I received two HP Compaq desktops - much smaller, low-end P-4s. They have Liteon PSUs in. Thought that was strange. Thought they (HP) would at least rebadge them...
 
kb said:
Likely to be on the limit (i.e prone to failure)

Intel D865GLC motherboard draws - 190W minimum.
.
Click to expand...

I hate to add fuel to the fire, but a 250watt psu would be sufficient for this spec pc. No, it's not a good spec, nor is it a good pc, but for what it is the power supply is adequate.

I do not know where the above 190watt figures come from, but an 865 chipset machine with fx5200, hdd, tv tuner, w/lan card/firewire card , optical drive, 512mb ram and 3ghz cpu can and has run reliably off a 180watt psu.

Sure, add a couple of hard drives and a few add-in cards to the mecer spec and you are pushing the envelope, but what they are selling with that spec psu (assuming it is a 250watt unit) isnt a catastrophe.
 
Werner, in perfect conditions, yes. But for most South Africans homes, not. Most areas in South Africa don't have stable power. Johannesburg is getting worse by the day. And the cheap ass PSUs that Mecer sell certainly can't produce what they are rated. I know this from experience because the company I work for replace dead Mecer PC's power supplies almost daily.

There is another issue thats most often overlooked. Watts is only half the picture. The PSU needs to be able to supply enough amps too. Your PSU has three power rails, one 3v one 5v and one 12v. Pentium-III and earlier CPUs got their power off the 5v rail. The Athlon was the first to move the CPU onto the 12v rail, along with the hard discs, fans, ect. This is by the way how the Athlon got such a bad reputation for reliability. Because people who upgraded didn't replaced their PSUs with units that coud provide enough amps on the 12v rail, and vendors didn't supply machines with strong enough power supplies.

For an avarage machine with an Athlon CPU three years ago, your stream requirements on the 12v rail was around 13A under full load. A lot of PSUs still can still only do 8A. Today the requirement is certainly much higher. I see a lot of PCs that just won't run stable, because the techy though he was smart and put a 350W PSU in, but didn't check to see if there are enough amps to go around.
 
EchoZA said:
I'll get a comparitive from RECTRON and then speck to a contact and get a price from MECER, then add 15% (reasonable mark-up) and post the results!

TELKOM just seems to be digging the hole deeper and deeper...
Click to expand...
No - Telkom gets all of this at wholesale, most likely even less than what dealers are charged. They aren't making a loss and neither is Mecer. Thumbs up to Mecer though for getting the contract :)
 
koffiejunkie, you will be glad to know that they advertise the psu as being atx 2.0 compatable (intel recommends minimum v2.0 compatable for lga775 cpu's), so, at least, the power supply is designed for that cpu/motherboard combination.

and yes, v=ir, so it doesnt matter if you express it as watts or amps, as you can work out the missing number for yourself, but as I think you were trying to state, it depends on how much current the 12v rail is capable of handling. Which is where the atx2.0 spec comes into play.

Anyway, I'm not trying to teach you how to suck eggs,you know your stuff, just pointing out that the psu is adequate for what they sell, contrary to the number of "OMFG!! 250watt *sniggers* " " type posts here already.
 
koffiejunkie said:
250 would be enoug if, and *only if*

1. The power supply is a high quality unit that can actually deliver 250w and sustain it - most power supplies don't even come close, the ones the Mecer ship most definitely dont.

2. Nothing is to be added afterwards.

My mom's Athlon is running off a 200W power supply, on dodgy power, and has been fine for the last three years (was a duron earlier on but I upgraded the box). That PSU, however, cost me close to a grand at the time - can't remember the brand though.

I have an Athlon 2400+ at home with nothing fancy really, 1 SATA disc, Low end radeon card, 2x RAM modules, soundblaster card and TV tuner. This runs fine of a 300W Thermaltake. But the Thermaltake replaced a handfull of 300W and evern 400W PSUs that didn't cope, even on stable power.
Click to expand...

I went through three 400W Thermaltake PSU's in 2 months. Eventually I got fed up and told them where to stick the last one. Been using a 300W mecer PSU since November last year without any problems. Guess its just luck of the draw :).

Cheers
Marnitz
 
Werner, no worries. I'm not an electronic engineer... But after losing a couple of Power supplies I decided some research is in order. I don't know the ATX 2.0 spec though, will have to read up on that.

My point was simply a PSU's capability is not necessarily what is advertised, more of often than not it's far from what it should be. So unless Mecer are using really high quality PSU, which I doubt, knowing them, I'd be carefull.

Or maybe they are using quality components for a change - might justify the price :-)
 
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