ODE to my late Sparkle spi 400 watt ATX

[cauzomb]

OK story time at the campfire..

Let's start off with a bit of history on this matter...

Back in the days when the overclockers store was still open, I set out to build an overclocking machine.. The athlon OC store offered components for overclockers, and listed their specs as stock plus what they could get out of them MHz wise... No guess work, no easter egg hunting on ten chips at a time trying to find a good one, and trying to recoup the rest of the money from the other ten processors... Or trying to exchange parts at Fry's after not getting what you were looking for.... That's what brought me to the Overclockers store, and it was great. Amungst the store there was the forum, "FORUMOC.COM" where you could read through pages of product recommendations, and get direct support on tweaking your parts from the OCZ store. I think that is where I found the review for the sparkle 400 watt PSU.

I remember purchasing the 400 watt SPI from Fry's electronics many years ago and it has been problem free until today. It went through several modifications, and voltage trimming sessions on the 5volt rail while overclocking. Mods including the addition of a new 4 pin motherboard power plug to provide another 12volt plug for the new AMD Nforce2 boards, and several more 4 pin molex plugs. All the while taking whatever I could throw at it, rock solid.. Yup, it was a great power supply for overclocking that old athlon 700mhz, all the way up to the 1GHZ at times but mostly run at 950.
I got it from the OCZ store, and it was only spec'd to run 900 but I got more out of it

It's been a great adventure with that PSU, but It finally happened...

It lasted a very long time running my 2400+ to 3200+ specs. With the addition of the power hungry x850pro, and all the drives, I had to back off the FSB to keep things running stable. I had 6 drives, a raid card and an ati x850pro plugged in, while OC'n my 2400+ to 170fsb, and agp to 75mhz... It was running good like this for a couple of years atleast.

A short while after starting up my computer this afternoon, it suddenly went silent, and the screen turned black, then the monitor started displaying the "no signal" warning.... No smoke, no poping, no fire, just turned off..

The failure was safe, in that it did not completely die. It just couldn't handle the load anymore.. Unfortunately the PC's bios didn't detect any adverse conditions, or envoke a shutdown. The good thing is that I didn't wind up with a fried OS, or any corrupted files durring the untimely shut-off.

I knew a long time ago that I needed another PSU, so about a year ago, when building my gaming rig, I purchased a corsair hx520 modular PSU. I tested it in my gaming rig, then upgraded to an OCZ 1010W PSU for SLI and Quad Core, then put the corsair hx520 on the shelf for a rainy day..

I guess it must have been raining in my old sparke psu....

I have heard good things about the corsair hx series PSU's.. It has been running stable on my system for about 3 hours.

I just hope it outlasts my dated web browsing machine..

[cauzomb]

Just an update on this Corsair PSU... It's been running my a64 3400+ at 2.5-2.65 GHZ with a progression of different pieces of hardware, leading up to a final setup that I had about this time last year, and has been fairly stable for a little over a year now with the following, 4 x OCZ vertex ssd's RAID 0, 2x wd caviar's RAID backup, and a couple different power hungry video cards..

[ionus]

i would have gone with an ocz modstream pro.. specifixally the 700 watt which is currently on sale at newegg for 75 bucks (normal price of 85)
ive been throwing it around lately on gamespot for various builds.
its also modular, gold certified, active pfc and looks kinda funky.

[cauzomb]

If it was available at the time, I didn't notice it on the Nvidia SLI certified PSU list. I started out hunting for sli certified 500-600 Watts. I read somewhere that the hx520 actually has overhead to about 680watts... after running an e6600 and dual 8800gt's, then upgrading to qx6700, and two 8800gts Factory OC's and overclocking the qx6700, I
ended up needing more power for the system to run right.. Ended up with an OCZ 1010 for that, the corsair sat on the shelf till the sparkle psu kicked the bucket..

I read that the OCZ PSU's are pretty good at providing clean voltage at high load.