90 watt power supply?!?

[Szech]

I was searching for power supplies on eBay, and there are 90 watt ATX power supplies that have been pulled from eMachines. 90 watts!? What exactly can you run with a 90 watt power supply? A motherboard and one hard drive?

[wangel]

The 'E' machines are noted for their cheapness. Why should they plut in a 235 or 250 power supply when it has been exactly calculated that a 90 watt would do just fine for these components. It probably saved them 5 or 10 bucks per computer. I hate the 'E' machines because they are cheap. I've even heard that they have swapped out the advertised CPU with different ones (lesser). They are not a machine worth upgrading.

[krusty the klown]

Well I haven't heard of 90W, but HP put pathetically small (125/150W?) units in some of their desktops.... and they're custom design, so you have to pay 4-5 times the cost of a generic 250W when it comes to replacing them.

Add that to mounting hard disk drives upside down so they fail and..... Grrrrr!

You're right about the 'not worth upgrading' tricks - that's exactly what some manufacturers do, even to the point of ensuring that the CPU and RAM supplied is the maximum the machine can take, so you have to ditch the mobo as well.... add in the cost of their time to do all this work and a user who cannot do that sort of upgrade themselves will often just opt for a new machine.

I believe the term is 'built-in obsolescence' and is a part and parcel of this throw-away society.....

[Sabbath]

I had a Compaq running AMD k6-2 350, 32X CD, Floppy, Modem, network card, and 2 additional fans I installed all running on 90 watts and never had any problems with it.

You have to understand that the manufacturer is out to make money, while else would you be in the buisness. If that means you can save $10 a machine by putting in a 90 watt power supply that works just fine so be it.

Lets say you sell 100,000 machines. $10 dollars a machine = 1,000,000 dollars you just saved by placing a 90 watt power supply instead of a 250 watt power supply.

Nobody goes into buisness because they felt like providing you a good service. You start a buisness because you have a service or product that you think you can make MONEY off of, bottom line. Although I do not agree with perposely setting machines up to fail, to me that is plane dishonesty.

[OuTpaTienT]

I've taken apart a few HP machines that had 100w power supplies. I just pulled the fan out of them.

[justy]

I seen PSU's that small being used in airports for the arrival/departure pc's. These were only a mobo and lan card with a boot rom.

All the best, Justy.

[slinger2g]

the reason why they use such small power supplies is because there really isn't anything to the e-machine.
its a small m\b with an ok hard drive, and a few cheesy cards.
basically, the cpu see's about 30% of the watts, and the cheesy cards and m\b take the rest.
thats why the best e-machine is still the slowest machine out the!

[Richard_Cranium72]

I have 2 E-Machine cases here.

Gutted of all components except the ps.

They are 145 watt, but they are the Smallest power supplies I've ever seen, I think 145 is counting the fan consumption and the heat losses cause the output must be tiny with such pitiful/small components

[TX_Poison]

I have a Compaq that has a 75 watt power supply. It's a 233 k6 with one hard drive, cd burner, and cdrom. Thats the lowest wattage power supply i have ever seen.

[dosmastr]

also, even notice how twitchy e's are?
sometimes components demand juice, they don't get it, the system goes down.

i don't agree in going out and using a 500Watt power supply (yes they do exist) but 90 watts is too low,

and as for making money, look at Dell, a good company (one of the very few i have never heard any complaints about) good components and they sure made some money.
only thing is, you get what you pay for. dell=good=expensive
emachienes=lesser quality components=inexpensive

Dosmastr

[justy]

dosmastr,

I disagree, Dell is Cr@p. The 19inch vivitron monitor and above is of reasonable quality. ( not fantastic ).

The reason you don't hear compliants, is maybe people accept Dell as what it is? An OEM. It label's products manufactuered by others.
e.g. Gateway, dell, sony, sell the exact same monitors under different model No.s.

All the best, Justy.