AlexZ wrote on 2026-04-23, 20:48:
They are so cheap you can get 400W, no need to look at 250-300W at all. If you don't find good ones, look at 350W. We are dealing with 25 years old worn out PSUs.
Locally I see Maxpower 400W for 9 EUR and FSP Blue Storm II 400W (3.3V+5V=152W, but 30A on 5V) for 12 EUR without postage, there is also an Eurocase 400W for 8 EUR. People are basically giving them away almost for free.
250W PSU was used for PII ATX boards.
Agree, you should find old 5V heavy PSUs cheap.
As I like to toy around with Socket A, I have many of these early 2000s 5V heavy PSUs, most are Enermax, but I have one odd GlobalWin (ToPower design) and BeQuiet too (again ToPower).
Although most of these have had secondary side caps that both look good and also measure in spec, I would by default recap these before putting them in any serious use. For example, that GlobalWin ToPower had leaked Teapo caps even though it was NOS. Enermax PSUs from this era also use Teapo heavily and I just recently recapped one with swollen and leaked Teapo caps, although few have been just fine. Teapo isn’t high quality, but there are even worse caps out there. And the quality can vary wildly with these cheap brands.
And even with quality caps these PSUs are a big unknown. They are 25 or so years old, you don’t know how many hours they have seen or how they have been stored along the years, all of which will affect the reliability of thes caps and thus PSUs.
So, if one can’t or doesn’t want to do these kinds of recaps, I would go with a motherboard that supports 12V VRM so you can use newer PSUs. For example, most nForce2 motherboards have that. On the otherhand, very few VIA chipset boards seem to have 12V CPU VRM, even with the later series such as KT600.
