I remember PC Chips back in the day. Not many people here in the US bought them. It was mostly used by mom & pop computer shops to make super cheap pre-builts in lower income areas. Then the high failure rates caused them to abandon using that brand. I specifically remember the stigma of that brand and avoided it like the plague. I believe the next step up from bottom of the barrel would have been ECS at that time. I remember buying an Athlon / ECS combo off Pricewatch because I needed a cheap file server.

wiretap wrote on 2021-09-10, 20:48:

I remember PC Chips back in the day. Not many people here in the US bought them. It was mostly used by mom & pop computer shops to make super cheap pre-builts in lower income areas. Then the high failure rates caused them to abandon using that brand. I specifically remember the stigma of that brand and avoided it like the plague. I believe the next step up from bottom of the barrel would have been ECS at that time. I remember buying an Athlon / ECS combo off Pricewatch because I needed a cheap file server.

When the public found out that PC Chips was crap, they started selling their shit under other names by avoiding using the PC Chips name. I also saw many ECS products that were very similar to pc chips products, I always suspected it was the same manufacturer. I once had an ECS laptop, which was very nice, the LCD lid had a metallic purple finish like a car paint, but that thing was hot like hell, you could easily fry an egg, in that case, my eggs . It was impossible to wear it on your lap. On a hot day, it got so hot that it stopped working. I used a hair dryer on the chipset, and it started working again, so I plugged the fan into a usb port so it would be running all the time, but the noise it made was really annoying. I ended up selling it with little use time

canthearu wrote on 2021-09-10, 12:07:

* If CPUs and video cards had stayed at the Pentium 200 MMX and s3 Trio levels of power usage, Antec would never have been designing 500W power supplies on a tight budget, nor would they be trying to dump all the waste heat from supplying that much power, we might never have had a PSU capacitor plauge.
* If Antec really properly understood how much heat these PSUs were going to be dealing with, they probably would have designed their PSUs to allow better cooling of critical components, like secondary side capacitors. Fixing this poor design might have allowed even the crap, bottom of the barrel capacitors they used, live quite a bit longer.
* If Antec just used better capacitors, they would be able to resist the heat from computers at the time and their poor thermal design to not really have too many capacitor problems.

True, but heat wasn't the only problem. The Fuhjyyu capacitors used by the manufacturer of those Antec units (Channel Well) were so abysmal that they failed even on unused power supplies!! I have a 250W Smart Power that I got new, shrink wrapped a few years ago in a flea market, when I opened it up it was of course immaculate, except for the caps on the secondary side, ALL of them were bulged and leaking from the top vent. Before it was turned on even a single time! (well, I suppose they did turn it on at the factory for the burn-in test...)

Of course, I did a full recap with Japanese brands and it works perfectly.

TheMobRules wrote on 2021-09-10, 21:14:

True, but heat wasn't the only problem. The Fuhjyyu capacitors used by the manufacturer of those Antec units (Channel Well) were so abysmal that they failed even on unused power supplies!! I have a 250W Smart Power that I got new, shrink wrapped a few years ago in a flea market, when I opened it up it was of course immaculate, except for the caps on the secondary side, ALL of them were bulged and leaking from the top vent. Before it was turned on even a single time! (well, I suppose they did turn it on at the factory for the burn-in test...)

Of course, I did a full recap with Japanese brands and it works perfectly.

Absolutely true. The Fuhjyyu capacitors used in these PSUs was absolutely bottom of the barrel. They were especially bad in a world full of bad capacitors.

Hence why they still make pretty good units after a recap with good quality capacitors. Good 5V rails and reasonably common.

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-09-10, 20:56:

When the public found out that PC Chips was crap, they started selling their shit under other names by avoiding using the PC Chips name. I also saw many ECS products that were very similar to pc chips products, I always suspected it was the same manufacturer.

You weren't wrong: http://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/pcchips.php (but not everything from PC Chips and ECS was just wrong, they had some decent exceptions)

The old or new PSU never damaged anything for me, at first the computer became unstable, and after exposing the mostly leaky and bulged capacitors and replacement, everything continued to work.

I've only had one psu go pop! That was on a Acorn A4000. I just replaced it with a spare one. No damage.

To answer the OPs question no, not at all.