L&c?

[Agent_Mull]

How good is L&C psus? a 350w one came with my comp and im just wonderig wether i should ditch it or keep it.

[Redstone]

Not a good PSU. It's in the DEER category. I had one for a couple of weeks and saw incredible fluctuations on the rails. Those poor readings started me down the road of getting educated on power supplies.
Have you taken it out of the case? Fails the unscientific weight test miserably.

[Agent_Mull]

is a lighter psu better?

[Oklahoma Wolf]

Not just in Deer country, L&C is Deer; along with US-Can, Mustang, Allied, Eagle, Austin, and Foxconn. Very high failure rates on these, and they often take out other parts of the system.

I would lose the L&C pronto, and grab a Fortron 350w or better; or Antec Truepower 430w or better. Generally, lighter PSU's indicate a lack of good build quality, but one can't always tell by weight. Best thing is to find out through message boards what's most reliable with the best performance. This is how I picked the Channel Well that replaced my own US-Can 250w that killed hard drives - I researched CWT over and over on about 7 different message boards before buying. Larva's sticky in particular was a great help to me.

[larrymoencurly]

Deer PSUs vary in quality, from fair to very poor. One of the worst is this 350W Codegen (http://www.mikhailtech.com/articles/psu/codegen350/codegen350-06.jpg), and while this 350W L&C (http://www.mikhailtech.com/articles/psu/l&c350/l&c350-07.jpg) looks much better (probably identical to Allied). Notice the EMI line filter in the lower right. It seems to consist of just a dual coil (white thing wrapped in varnished wire) and a capacitor (red thing) across them. In comparison look at the EMI filter for this 450W Channel Well (http://www.hardwarezoom.com/images/reviews/44/open-3.jpg) (almost identical to Antec SmartPower). It starts in the upper right, on a small circuit board mounted on the AC receptacle, you can see a capacitor (boxy grey thing), a coil pair, and a blue disk capacitor. This connects to a second filter on the main circuit board, between the green-yellow and blue wires, consisting of a coil (round, covered with yellow tape), a dual coil, and two yellow boxy capacitors (one behind that coil). Also these capacitors are probably UL approved for safety, but I don't think that the one in the Deer is.

[Oklahoma Wolf]

Originally posted by larrymoencurly
Also these capacitors are probably UL approved for safety, but I don't think that the one in the Deer is.

I actually tried to use the 470mf 200v capacitors in my 250 to repair my TV set (had two very large 470's from the mid 1970's), but the cure was worse than the disease.