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I was just curious as to what TR gerbils think of the Antec TruePower PSU series. In particular, I've been planning to order two of their 650W models for two separate builds.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817371021

Modular cabling is a plus, the price is a plus, the reviews seems good as well (although I always take them with a grain of salt). AFAIK they are a reliable brand. Are there better alternatives for the $99.99 price point, or are these PSU's probably the best I'll find?

With MIR, the Corsair 650TX seems better with 2A less on the 12V rails.

I don't know much about their newer TruePower units. The older ones (from ~5 years ago) were problematic; I owned several, and all of them died from bad caps.

I don't like Antec. There are plenty of threads here at TR explaining why.

I owned a Neo 430 in the post-busted-caps era. The unit was OEM'ed by Seasonic and is working fine, though I have to admit I rarely break drawing 200W at the wall so not much load is placed on the unit, yet.

We enthusiasts have long memories, so it will take consistent success stories over a period of time to rebuild damaged reputations. I'm sure there are still people bitter about the old OCZ.

Oh my. I guess Antec isn't as good as I thought they were. Reliability is a key for me here.

From what I've readd, Corsair tends to be a favorite. Any other good choices for a 550/650 PSU? Preferably modular cabling, I've yet to try this stuff out but I hear it works wonders.

SecretMaster wrote:

Oh my. I guess Antec isn't as good as I thought they were. Reliability is a key for me here.

IMO they have bounced back from the dark days of busting caps, as I owned an Antec unit now.

SecretMaster wrote:

From what I've readd, Corsair tends to be a favorite. Any other good choices for a 550/650 PSU? Preferably modular cabling, I've yet to try this stuff out but I hear it works wonders.

Corsair 520HX is pretty much the universal recommendation. The Enermax Modu82+ is another highly-regarded unit, and with the price to boot.

I guess im the minority then .

I own a Antec 550w Truepower 2.0, flawless thus far. I've also built a few small business servers using the same power supply. Only had one fail, and that was due to someone turning the air condition OFF in a small server room 90*F+ in a server = 2 dead servers and lots of pissed off employees. Good thing it wasn't our fault, some lady was getting too cold in her office tehehe.

If I buy a new PSU for a new system I think im going to go with Corsair 750-850w

TechSecret (who are pretty thorough when it comes to PSU reviews) was quite enthusiastic about the Antec 750 -- according to them, the TruPower line are actually produced by Seasonic. (You have to be careful about this, because it's sometimes true that some of the models in a named line are produced by one mfr and some of the others are produced by another).

So then why not just buy a Seasonic? Or one of the other manufacturers that doesn't have a spotty past?

Buub wrote:

So then why not just buy a Seasonic? Or one of the other manufacturers that doesn't have a spotty past?

Price, features, availability? Just because Seasonic makes a particular model for another company doesn't mean that exact same model is available under their name at the same price. (I haven't bothered to check to see if that's true in this particular case.)

Buub wrote:

So then why not just buy a Seasonic? Or one of the other manufacturers that doesn't have a spotty past?

If spotty past = no buy ever, then there is a good chance you won't be able to buy anything at all. One example I can think on top of my head is hard drives. All the big boys had their respective dark chapters of history. Does that mean you swear them off altogether? I certainly won't, but tarnished reputation does need a long time to be rebuilt for me.

Flying Fox wrote:

Buub wrote:

So then why not just buy a Seasonic? Or one of the other manufacturers that doesn't have a spotty past?

If spotty past = no buy ever, then there is a good chance you won't be able to buy anything at all. One example I can think on top of my head is hard drives. All the big boys had their respective dark chapters of history. Does that mean you swear them off altogether? I certainly won't, but tarnished reputation does need a long time to be rebuilt for me.

That's entirely different. All the hard drive companies that had runs of bad drives had a solid reputation for making millions of good drives before each of those events happened. Yes, currently I am swearing off Seagate drives because of the 7200.11 fiasco, but once it's been solidly determined that they have put that behind them, I will probably buy their drives again, because they have a long rich history of making great drives.

Another example is OCZ. I felt similarly about OCZ as I feel about Antec. In OCZ's case, their owner/management made all sorts of bold claims, seeded review copies with RAM that was not representative of what was available on the market (in fact, if I remember right, one reviewer was sent RAM made by someone else with an OCZ label on it). However, the assets and name of the company were bought by someone else, and the company made very visible signs of departing from its past. Even going so far as buying PC Power and Cooling, a company noted for making the best power supplies in the industry. I think it's been quite clear that they make good stuff now. Even with that being the case, and that I now consider them in the potential buy category, I do not put them above other vendors with a good track record.

Antec had similar issues. Even though it didn't try to distort its public image as aggressively, it came on the market with all sorts of claims about how excellent their products were. They were priced against the Enermax's and comparable brands of the time, and somehow receive excellent reviews. Yet their units died in spades after short times in service. Combine that with some of their other products that were outright crap, like some SCSI trays I bought, where some of the fans weren't even connected to power, the SCSI IDs didn't always work, etc. It was just really cheap, crappy workmanship.

In Antec's case, they have made some strides to improve, but I don't see the clean separation with the past. Moreover, they have a lot of competition (including OCZ) in power supplies. Since I haven't seen any real public, clear repentance, and since there are a whole lot of other alternatives, I'd rather give their competitors the business. In fact, I would rather buy OCZ than Antec simply because OCZ made such a clear, explicit effort to distance themselves from their past, while Antec seems to be trying (IMHO anyway) to patch up the past without really acknowledging it.

Its not different at all... As fox said, every one of them has made crap at some point in time, be it that they make video cards, motherboards, hard drives. Whether they acknowledge it is a totally different story and totally dependent on the company and has nothing to do with what type of hardware they make. I used to not care for ATI cards, the 9800Pro series as much as it was a good contender always had their fans break, overheat and fry the GPU. Because of that I would not buy an ATI card and stuck with a slightly underpowered Nvidia at that time. Now ATI's cards are the bang for the buck (provided they have been bought by AMD but still...) and i'd buy one of their cards over an Nvidia. It helps my decision because NVidia has done nothing but whine about Intel and act very immature for a multi-billion dollar company. Does this mean that I will never buy an Nvidia card every again.... no, but it will take time for me to trust or care for them or their products again.

When choosing hardware based on its companies reputation... Ask yourself these questions.

1. Are bad products a long time or recent habit of theirs?
2. Is the company likely to stiff me on a warranty in the event that their product is bad?
3. Is there a company with a better track record for only a little more or the same?

If you answered yes to one or more of these, you might want to look around for other options. No company should have a long track record of bad products and receive your cash. If its recent you might want to wait for the light at the end of the tunnel before forking over your cash. Obviously if they are going to stiff you on taking care of a crappy product you want nothing to do with them, and if there is another option for a little more, don't be afraid to drop and extra 20.00 on a quality product, you'll thank yourself later.

At that point its up to you whether there is a risk and whether you want to take it. Fortunately you've got one hell of a resource that I see much more valueable than just one persons advice or recommendation. You've got the TR forums with MANY users who have first hand experience with almost any company and can paint you a decently accurate picture.

The OCZ that your talking about BTW, originally got its bad rep from being a company that would re-brand under a new name every 2-3 years to avoid having to cover warranties on their previous companies products, bold claims just came as the cherry on top ... now that is one low thing to do as a company and requires a long time to trust them again. It still sticks in the back of my mind when I see their name. However, i'd consider buying something from them, but id be very cautious.

While I don't totally agree. In the one case (OCZ), they made very obvious attempts to separate themselves from their spotty past, in the other (Antec) they've moved forward without really acknowledging their spotty past.

But I guess, most vividly, because of their public problems, I never bought any OCZ products. But because Antec was selling widely on their quality while making crap, I did buy their stuff. Not really Antec's fault, I guess, that the rest of the public bought their line while OCZ shot themselves in the foot publicly enough to prevent them from being widely popular at the time. But the end result is that I have a stack of Antec products (power supplies and SCSI trays) that I have thrown in the trash over the years. That leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, that I'm not eager to repeat. Or to put it another way, I'd rather give any competent competitor of theirs a chance before giving them more of my business.

Since OCZ's turnaround, I have given them a chance with one product. And I have not been let down. I have since bought two more of their products, and they work fine. Antec has possibly improved just as much, but I'm not giving them another chance.

Fair enough, everyone has their experiences and you use them to make your decisions, can't hold that against you.

I generally like Antec's cases (I own several, and would consider an Antec case if I was in the market for one). It'll be a while before I trust their PSUs again though.

Speaking of dodgy "name brand" hardware, I'm going to put in an anti-vote here for Thermaltake, in particular their TR2 series. The last 3 Thermaltake TR2 PSUs I've owned all started causing random system shutdowns/reboots within a year or so of purchase (3 different systems, and in all 3 cases the spontaneous reboots went away when the PSU was replaced with a different brand, so it is definitely not a system-specific issue). None of them were loaded to anywhere near their rated capacity either, so it isn't a case of the PSU being pushed too hard; it seems like they're just plain flaky. I also own a couple of their TR2 "Silent Boost" copper CPU coolers; while the heatsink itself seems to be fairly well-made, the fan is total crap -- the bearings on both of them died within a year. Fortunately you can just strap an 80 or 92 mm case fan on it to replace the piece of junk fan it ships with.

On the flip side, Ultra is a PSU brand I've been pleasantly surprised with. I had a couple of negative experiences with other (non-PSU) Ultra products when they first started to become widely available, so I was somewhat skeptical of their PSUs as well. But their PSUs seem to give surprisingly good bang-for-the-buck, and I have yet to have one fail. A couple of the flaky Thermaltake TR2s mentioned above were replaced with Ultra PSUs, and they've been great. We've also replaced a couple of dead PSUs at the office with Ultras, and they're still going strong as well.