Aideka wrote:

Please, kill that thing with fire before it kills itself, and your computer with it.

Or your house, or you. That's a standard disc capacitor on the input which is an electrocution hazard.

......yeah. That's a Linkworld. What I said in my post about Deer units applies here as well. If interested, OklaWolf on JonnyGuru did a little review of one of these a while back.

Caesum wrote:

Do you have any suggestions which brands should I consider and which not? Or not really?

Sparkle/SPI/FSP, Enermax, Seasonic are all good names.

Just remember that older FSP units are likely to need a re-cap. Ditto for the (otherwise good) Antecs of the era.
I'd also add PC Power & Cooling to the list, with the caveat that they, too had a string of bad caps around the early 2000s.

Basically you need to get pretty familiar with a soldering iron and sourcing replacement caps.

Delta also made, and still makes, pretty good PSUs. Here in Finland they are also pretty cheap, because people assume they are crap, since many OEM boxes use them. They had some cases with bad caps, but then again so did everyone else in those times. As said above, Antecs are also good, but will need to be recapped, preferably before plugging it in the first time... (I have had 4 Antec PSUs explode a cap when plugging them in, that smell and the sound they make when your head is next to them is something you don't want to experience...)

Okay guys I'm really sorry to bump this thread only now, but I think I found out the issue. Apparently it was not the power supply but bios configuration. According to THIS thread this problem is caused by wrong AGP aperture size (what does it do anyway?). I changed mine from 64mb to 4mb and all the games work flawlessly now. Everything is smooth and perfect.

I'll be still looking for a new power supply though since as you said the one I have is a death machine, but just wanted you to know that if anyone has similar issue to mine, then this whole AGP aperture size thing fixed it for me.

Thanks for all your help!

Caesum wrote:

Okay guys I'm really sorry to bump this thread only now, but I think I found out the issue. Apparently it was not the power supply but bios configuration. According to THIS thread this problem is caused by wrong AGP aperture size (what does it do anyway?). I changed mine from 64mb to 4mb and all the games work flawlessly now. Everything is smooth and perfect.

I'll be still looking for a new power supply though since as you said the one I have is a death machine, but just wanted you to know that if anyone has similar issue to mine, then this whole AGP aperture size thing fixed it for me.

Thanks for all your help!

You have not really "fixed" your problem. Using under-powered weak PSU is just asking for more problems. Socket A boards of this kind that get most of the power from the +5V line and youneed a better PSU than what you are currently using. It is not a question of IF it burns up but WHEN it burns up. You could easily lose your motherboard.

I'm thinking about not running this PC at all until I find a better PSU tbh. The one I have now worked for ages on another PC, but I really don't want to use it if it can break my PC (especially if it can kill me and my family). I just wanted to check if it's really the PSU that caused this problem or something else. Could it be because of the faulty PSU that I had to change AGP aperture size, or it's not related to it?

By the way, I must say I am incredibly surprised by just how lively this old PC is even after all these years. It was given to me by my uncle as a present for my communion and I had it since. This means then that this PC is literally 14 years old if not more. Of course it has its problems now (bad PSU, CD-ROM doesn't want to open unless there's a CD inside) but it's quite amazing how long it worked anyway. My next PC had hardware problems practically already when I received it. They don't do PCs like that these days.

I guess once I'm done with this PC I will try to resurrect another one that I have lying in the attic. I think hardware should be used from time to time otherwise it dies pretty quick.