ebay and AliExpress suppliers sell lots of these PSUs, I was wondering to buy a new one. But seems like it should be better to buy an old one and test it carefully.

rkurbatov wrote on 2024-01-25, 21:10:

ebay and AliExpress suppliers sell lots of these PSUs, I was wondering to buy a new one. But seems like it should be better to buy an old one and test it carefully.

Definitely stay away from those "new" PSUs from Ebay and Aliexpress.

I've made the mistake of buying a couple from different Ebay sellers. One turned out to be a fake Antec PSU, the other one off-brand, but clearly cheaply made junk.

I now only buy old power supplies where I am 100% certain it's an authentic unit.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-01-25, 21:32:

I now only buy old power supplies where I am 100% certain it's an authentic unit.

They are mostly Authentic Taiwanese replicas of early 1990s 😀

Though I clearly see that Taiwan is not China on that matter, 🤣.

If anyone feels like gambling or looking for a real Antec PP-xxxV this is how the genuine label and internals should look like.

This is only valid for the Chanel Well CWT9xxyyy models. Even brought brand new it will have bad capacitors though! A decade ago there were Antec AT units with Topower and SPI/FSP internals also.
If seller has photos that allow to peek into the vent grill then one can almost verify the internals.

Is caps the only problem of old PSUs? Will it be safer to recap them all?

What other problems were you expecting? After all those PSUs did work just fine back in the day 😀 Now they need all secondary caps and some small ones in the middle. Big expensive primary caps are almost never (99.999) degraded.

Runar77 wrote on 2024-01-23, 08:40:

giantclam wrote on 2024-01-23, 00:39:

What mainboard is it? A possible scenario is a tantalum cap has failed on the 5volt rail, which took the PSU beyond it's rating and kaboom....it failed before the tant. exploded....and that capacitor is still shorted on the mainboard (hence no boot and squeaky beep) ~ you would need remove cards/cpu/ram and check the resistance of the 5volt rails.

It's a Soyo 025N mainboard. I have been offered some assistance from a guy I know. I can ask him to check this. Thanks.

always test new PSUs on cheaper motherboard, if you don't have some kind of PSU tester.
It's best to keep some dead motherboard for that, and put some dead CPU, so it draws some power. don't try with expensive socket 3 motherboards. 😀

W.x. wrote on 2024-01-26, 19:29:

always test new PSUs on cheaper motherboard, if you don't have some kind of PSU tester.
It's best to keep some dead motherboard for that, and put some dead CPU, so it draws some power. don't try with expensive socket 3 motherboards. 😀

It was the only motherboard I had, but I've learned my lesson.

The motherboard does seem to work again, at least it posts to the no keyboard-message. Just waiting for an AT keyboard so I can test it some more.