bristlehog wrote:

I meant the audible noise from PSU fan. For my 400W EPS Emacs PSU it's a nasty hi-freq buzz.

I don't recall that ever being a problem. The hard drive usually drowned out any power supply fan noise anyway.

Yeah, I never remember power supply noise being as much as the hard drives--especially the older ones that still had the grounding sleeve on the tip of the motor.

Our Cyrix build on the other hand was nothing but fans! It took 17 fans to cool it and it would almost max out a 1000va UPS when booting up. 😲 It was actually working until the on board battery did something like die or leak or both. 🙁 Now, it won't boot or anything. It's a Supermicro board, and I was thinking of sending it back to them for repair. Do they do that sort of thing?

NJRoadfan wrote:

I don't recall that ever being a problem. The hard drive usually drowned out any power supply fan noise anyway.

Spme of us now use SD cards, CF cards which reduces HD noise to zero. I don't miss using a real hard drive so a quiet PSU becomes very important.

I feel the same. Modern ATX power supplies are very quiet. The AT PSU from my 486 is quite noisy. I also don't trust it, it could take the motherboard with it if it fails.

Apart from the -5V, which isn't an issue for me, I am very happy with using ATX power supplies and ATX>AT adapters.

I just replaced my PSU with a really quiet one (Seasonic S12II). But I don't hear any difference in noise because there's still a Fireball CX in there 🤣

I've set the HDDs to stop spinning after 5 minutes of inactivity. That helps but it's quite annoying having to wait for it to spin up again.

CF and SSD resolves all of this 😀

about 5 months ago I also upgraded the psu on my ss7 build... since I replaced the lapc-i with a mpu401at+cm32l (and did not need -5v anymore) I just used a Chieftec psu that I found locally for ~38eur:
CHIEFTEC GPA-450S8 IARENA SERIES 450W : http://www.chieftec.com/power_GPA.html
don't have any complains other than when used with a baby-at tower the psu needs to go with the fan up... 🤣

keropi wrote:

... CHIEFTEC GPA-450S8 IARENA SERIES 450W ...

Got a pic of the GPA-400S8 (which should be very similar or identical):

CWT design, cheap but not too bad. They even put a MOV. Crappy caps but that goes without saying with cheap PSUs. Should work OK with low-draw retrocomps, but I wouldn't test its ability to deliver the max advertised power ...