Madshrimps Forum Madness - FSP and Silverstone PSU Compared in Crossfire Stress Test

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FSP and Silverstone PSU Compared in Crossfire Stress Test

We take a look at two high wattage power supplies from companies known for their solid product lines; the Silverstone DA750 model features a single 12v rail and is rated at 750W. The FSP Epsilon has four 12v rails and combined offers up to 900W. We stress test these units in a real world environment with the most power hungry vga cards out there, two ATI HD 2900 XT in Crossfire. Read on to find out

http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=558

FORTRON / FSP Power Supply Units

FORTRON / FSP Power Supply Units are unreliable hardware devices.
Failed just after 784 days of normal use (about 3500 hours only)!.

MTBF doesn't guarantee you a minimum life-time expectancy FYI

Yes, 2 years but warranty was over since 1,5 month only.

how many FSP PSU do you own?

Just one, Epsilon 700w definitively useless by now also it was properly protected with an UPS.
Such material is normally designed for 100,000 hours.

Quote:

Such material is normally designed for 100,000 hours.

no, it has MTBF of 100.000 hours. And MTBF != LifeTime

Quote:

nother common misconception about the MTBF is that it specifies the time (on average) when the probability of failure equals the probability of not having a failure (i.e. a reliability of 50%). This is only true for certain symmetric distributions. In many cases, such as the (non-symmetric) exponential distribution, this is not the case. In particular, for an exponential failure distribution, the probability that an item will fail at or before the MTBF is approximately 0.63 (i.e. the reliability at the MTBF is 37%). For typical distributions with some variance, MTBF only represents a top-level aggregate statistic, and thus is not suitable for predicting specific time to failure, the uncertainty arising from the variability in the time-to-failure distribution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_ti...sconcepti ons

you can't decide on experience with ONE sample that a whole range of products is broken/bad.

I agree with you and the above MTBF but when you pay US$200 for a device you don't expect that you should do it again 2 years later... :-)
Especially when the breakdown is obviously the device itself.

I've had laptops break down a week after their warranty has expired, sometimes you get the short end of the stick ;)
the other 200 laptops kept working years after their warranty expired.... that's life

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Originally Posted by jmke (Post 255411)

you can't decide on experience with ONE sample that a whole range of products is broken/bad.

Epsilon platform based PSUs commonly show "ripple happiness" from the start (even some advertised PSU specs breaking ATX specification) and FSP uses mostly cheap capacitors avoided by many makers.
So with such product propability of getting that short end of the stick is simply higher.