Recommend a cheap good 400W or above PSU

[DentyCracker]

Title says it all. Just got LDW-411S. Burns DVDs fine but it has a problem reading disks. This may be windows related as the behaviour is different in my two XP installations. In the primary with lots of burning apps installed, it says directory is corrupted and cannot be read. In secondary with no burning apps installed it behaves as if nothing is on the disk, filesystem reported as raw. It seems remarkably similar to a problem I had when I put in a LiteON 24x burner a couple years ago in my old machine. I remember solving that by getting a new PSU. Money is tight for the moment so i'd like a cheap and cheerful solution.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

just under £30 for a 550W psu
I use an antec myself but others who've used the above psu have not reported any problems!

[Taz]

What about this, should be pretty quiet as well

http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/product.php?view=1742

[GNEP]

I recently bought a Seasonic Super Tornado 300W and it's the quietest PSU I've ever heard since they had fans. Not too expensive either although the only UK distributor I found was http://www.koolnquiet.co.uk/

Not sure about the equivalents in 400+W but Taz's suggestion looks like a similar concept to my Seasonic.

[Kurt]

One company: Fortron Source Power. They make the best PSUs for the desktop. Period.

You can find some rebranded models in Aopen, Zalman, Power&Cooling, etc.

[Indiana]

I have a BeQuiet! 400W PSU and it's quite quiet ( ), too....

[Faramir1966]

BeQuiet here too.420W.No problems so far.Very quiet and nice looking too

[a_h]

Maybe you should better get a better 350W psu instead of a cheap 400+ version that operates at low efficency. You don't need all the juice anyway.

My rig uses a 300W hec psu without any issues (2xpIII 1.4-S, 1 GB ram, dvd-rom, cd-burner, audigy, tv-card, lan, parhelia, hdd).

psus have to be driven with at least 80% load to operate efficently (~70% efficency).

When you get one, have a look at the specified ampéres on the 3.3/5V rail (and combined power too). These are likely to be too weak sometimes.

AFAIK you can even drive a 2GHz P4 with a 200W psu (industrial pc for example) if you choose the components accordingly.

Besides burning dvd needs more power than reading discs, so i don't think this is a psu issue. Did you upgrade the firmware?

[DentyCracker]

Firmware is the latest (nov 6 2003). Note I have 3 Atapi CDROM type devices, including two burners see sig. Even on secondary clean install of windows there are problems reasing the drive. It may be cables. I'll get some other cables and check. I have also tried moving around the drive on the ide chain. nero cdspeed and dvd speed have no problems with the raw data, but cdspeed can't do the scan disk seeing as it requires filesystem access. It may be that the reg. is fuXx0r3d on both installations. Will redo secondary installation and see what happens. It seems that some disks are better than others. It can read my cdrws without a problem so far

[DentyCracker]

Once I get more solvent I'll probably get a Zalman 400W PSU. It is very quiet and has very little variation in voltage from 0 to full load. Did I mention that it is quiet?

[GNEP]

Not as quiet as my Seasonic, at least according to SilentPCReview...

[az]

Seventeam are also very good, quiet, and not too expensive.

AZ

[DentyCracker]

The plot thickens. The main problem I was having is that the drive just didn't want to read certain discs. Most problematic was the Mandrake 9.2 RC1 disk 1 which always came up as a corrupted directory. I had even uninstalled SiS' ide 2.03 drivers and was running MS' drivers, with no change in behaviour. Downloaded the ide 2.04a drivers which just became available. Now can read the Mandrake disc. EzCD 6 still doesn't recognise the drive as a burner though. Nero does

[a_h]

Heared some people have problems with this dvd-burner, especially with hacked firmwares (it seems to be possible to make a 401 to a 411 with just a firmware flash).

Maybe the dvd-burn apps aren't too mature yet?