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More horror stories about Allied Power supplies.

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klear

Member
Joined
Jan 9, 2002
Well I'm writing this on my other computer. I was listening to music on my computer and all the sudden it just shut off. I thought the cat had switched off my power strip again but no, i couldn't turn it back on. Couple seconds later I smell something like burning plastic and I trace it back to my power supply which is my now beaten and battered Allied power supply (I say beaten and battered because I have the computers in the basement and it just so happened that when I pulled the supply out it slipped out of my fingers at a very fast rate and plummeted to the floor. I picked it up again and tried to squash a bug on the opposite wall. I missed. I repeated the steps over and over until the bug was gone.)

Anyways, the supply damaged my 52x CD-ROM which was where the music was coming from, it now no longer reads burned cd's and has to read real cd's for a long time before it sees them.

If you are thinking about going the cheap route and settling for an Allied supply, consider how much its going to cost to replace the part that it takes out when it decides to burn out.

And please, if you have an Allied supply currently, they make a nice flat surface for jamming a golf ball tee into and practicing your driving. Also I found it a good tool to prop up a small swamp cooler outside a window well. I'm sure you can find many other usefull things to use these 40$ paper weights for.


Don't use allied.
 
Aw crap, how old is that unit? I put one in a customer's machine. I figured Foxconn would be okay. I think that is the parent company.
 
The unit was 8-9 weeks old, and yes foxconn is the parent company. Foxconn aka Allied aka Supercase aka Austin, maybe more but they are all crap.
 
Deer/Allied/LC Power/Foxconn/et al. is pure junk, and dangerous junk. Be thankful it was only the CD-ROM it fried. I've seen many of these units take out the motherboard, all drives, and expansion cards when they blow. And they do blow, sometimes with a nifty fire and smoke show to mark their exit. Some people ignore my warnings against this complete and utter horsecrap because they want to use the cheapest and easiest thing that comes to hand, expecting that ignoring the well known shortcomings of these units somehow eliminates them as a concern. Fortron/Sparkle costs precious little more, and is amongst the best you can buy, rather than defining the absolute worst. The cost difference between the two is money you don't want to save, regardless of how big of numbers they paste on the side of the Allied garbage.
 
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Oddly enough, I cracked open my old Dell last weekend to clean the dust out. I haven't really used this computer since I built one in September, and what do I see when I slide open the door? Allied on the PSU. Ah well. It's been good too me, but it's a 600 Celeron with PC100 Ram and a GeforceMX in it. If it goes, it goes.
 
That's not the original power supply then. Say what you want about dell, but they don't use crap like that. Try sticking it in your P4 and see how far it gets you ;)
 
You guys just convinced me to order that 350W Sparkle with the 120mm fan to replace the Allied that came in my Foxxconn case. While I was at it I got a new case too! Better poor than sorry and broke! :)
 
Considering the replacement cost of all the nice parts you've got in your rig, that is a very wise move. Cheap insurance. I think you will like the sparkle a lot, wish I had the 120mm version.
 
The thing I don't understand is if these things are so dangerous and countless people have had to pay to pay from one part to their entire system after a few months of use. If this happens so much, why aren't they getting in trouble?
 
No one bothers complaining to them and they sell so much so it's like such a huge ratio. Not to mention no one is willing to probably make a lawsuit out of it because it isn't worth it... when a lawyer cost that much and you can buy like more than a dozen PSUs with that kind of money and you don't even know what you're going to get out of it. They aren't going to sue when every psu dies like the IBM issue.
 
I had to replace two computers with cheapo PSU in them. One took out the motherboard and CD-ROM drive. So the cost to replace was motherboard+CD-ROM+new PSU.

That Sparkle with 120mm fan seems to be a good deal from the XP place. I checked the reseller price, and compared to it they have a pretty good deal.
 
Wow! I have an allied power supply that came with a case and it's been running for about 8 months now. I haven't had one single problem with it. All these stories are making me want to go out and buy a new one before disaster strikes.
 
Yeah, same with me. Except that it didn't come with the case. It's an Allied 350W. No probs so far, but i've only had the PC up and running for about a month. However, I am currently completely broke, and as I am only 15 I won't be able to afford a new one very soon... I really can't wait until I have enough cash to get a new one.... I can use this current one as backup or something. An extra one lying around.

However, there's one thing that worries me. The local computer repairshop here puts Allied in all its PCs. Now That's just a disaster waiting to happen...
 
wow

I bought a pc from northgate last year,came with a 250w allied psu.

I ran alotta fans and stuff with it and i never once had a problem!

I sold the pc to my friends mom last week!
(hope it dont burn her house down) lol
 
I posted a pic of my old US-Can (same as Allied) 250w in this thread: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=267035

At the time I bought the Foxconn case that included this PSU, these 250's were the worst PSU's on planet Earth and little has changed since. These had the highest failure rate of anything I'd ever seen in my years as an electronics tech, though for a long time I counted myself lucky because my 250w powered the old Duron 700 @ 800 for almost two years. In my ignorance, I thought that Western Digital just made bad hard drives, and that was why my 45gb kept dying on me after each RMA. Then, when the computer got more and more unstable, I finally pulled the 250w and had a good look at the innards. It had severely overheated in two places, one of which caused it to nearly catch fire; and all four filter capacitors on the output side were bulging or leaking. In my tests of the main 470 mf 200v filter caps, both were found bad.

This was the worst designed PSU I've ever seen, and about the only thing I was able to salvage from it was the wiring. Not having a source for Fortron at the time, I spent $105 Cdn for the Channel Well in my sig, and after a year and a half of 24/7 use it's everything the old US-Can wasn't; and no hard drives had to die for it.
 
the first psu i fried was a 400 watt allied. of course, i quickly looked it up to promptly order a replcement, and when i saw it for 29 dollars, i realized it might be a hunk of crap. i bought a ttgi, but running torndos as case fans , plus running 2.1-2.2 vcore and so on, i started to get hdd problems, and after trying everything possible, i took the advice of a friend here at the forums, and took out the ttgi, and replaced it with my other ttgi...and all is well since then. i also stopped using tornados as case fans. i was going to go dual-psu, but i have since learned that tornados as case fans are overkill, and i get a great overclock with simple 32 cfm coolermasters...5 of them, as intakes, and 2 120mm 69cfm exhaust bloholes. i do use a 92mm tornado on my cpu heatsink, and an 80mm tornado on my ax-7 for the gpu, as well as a delta 60mm 38cfm fanwich. those are on my nexus 201 fan controller. blah blah blah..... my next psu will be a PCP&C the ttgi performs excellent, but too many tornados and so on will definately begin to kill it....i believe my ttgi is weak, and unstable, and the current one i am using is woking great. i mention this because when i fried the ttgi, it began to weaken over time, but the allied just simply fried...hands down....no holds barred....dead as a doornail.......no warnings....no instabilities, but i will say, i had the best damn allied out there....i say that because unlike the average.....mine took no casualties......lmao.....

yeah, allied is a joke.... not a bad psu for a dual-psu , if you plan to run fans and other irrelevant items on it, to save the good psu's outputs for the important items such as the motherboard, cpu, hdd's.........;)

PCP&C: http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com/products/power_supplies/index.htm
 
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