Should be OK with care...I've an Astec unit stripped a few years ago from an old Medion system (AGP-less MSI OEM ZX board, P3 coppermine 650MHz, 512MB PC100, hdd, optical & floppy) still going strong today for testing & temp builds - recently had a spring clean inside Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

I think these also came in HP Pavilion mini towers from the era. I had one with a 366 MHz Celeron.

it does seem like one of the few PC PSU brands that did use japanese caps pretty consistently in the 90s, which can't even be said for seasonic. i do however have another 200w astec unit from 2000 that does partially have jamicon in it, so they started skimping a bit on caps as well, at least on some units. more than anything i'm not using that one because one PCB corner is cracked, though.

recently came across this old thread and was a bit surprised seeing a report of an astec PSU causing a motherboard to burn up: Building a Pentium Pro system from scratch

That 110watt supply is a very low end meant for Celerons and onboard video, not really for anything with a add-on video card or AGP slot. In fact would not power a good ATX Pentium or Pentium Pro system. Yes some Astec's were notorious for not having over volt/overload/short circuit protection. I would not use that to test any motherboard my self but feel free to experiment.

Really? I have a 110W Mitac PSU in a SS7 PC I wanted to upgrade, possibly with a GeForce 2 card. I thought that parts of the time didn't use much power? i.e. K6-3 using 30 to 40W max, GPUs using up to 10W, etc.

brian105 wrote on 2020-06-06, 03:32:

Really? I have a 110W Mitac PSU in a SS7 PC I wanted to upgrade, possibly with a GeForce 2 card. I thought that parts of the time didn't use much power? i.e. K6-3 using 30 to 40W max, GPUs using up to 10W, etc.

That 110 W max would not be that bad if you did not have additional per rail maximums, but even if we don't take that into account :

CPU 30W (K6-2 475) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_K6_microprocessors
Video card 25W (can't find any formal figures for Geforce 2 GTS, but 25W for a Geforce 3 ti 200 is a figure I have seen floating around)
Motherboard 8.5w at least estimated (686B use 2.5W, could not find specs for MVP3 or MVP4, but 430TX is 1W, and at least 5W for VRMs, super IO, etc , probably too conservative)
Addition card 7W each estimated (at least 1 sound card, I imagine)
RAM 5W ( 0.1 A at 3.3V per chip typical, so about 2.64 W per 8-chip DIMM, so about 5W for 2 DIMMs)https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search … t=clnk&gl=ca#25
Hard drive 7.1W at idle (as an example of a period drive https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_detail … l=WDC%20WD400BB)
CD-ROM 27W (0.6A on 5V and 2A on 12V https://www.recycledgoods.com/mitsumi-24x-ide … ve-crmc-fx240s/)
Total 109.6W

EDIT: And even if the GPU is closer to 10W, you're still cutting it close, IMHO .

I would say you are living dangerously .

Luckily, integrated sound. But still, that's cutting it pretty close.

Perhaps this old thread of mine will help. I misremembered -- my Pavilion was running a 466 MHz Celeron.

Video Card Power Consumption