Question EVGA 500W or Gamemax GP500

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May 15, 2019
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As the title suggests. Have a budget of about £35 and trying to choose between the EVGA 500W 80 Plus or the Gamemax GP500 80 Plus Bronze. Currently I can buy the EVGA for £33.50 and the Gamemax for £30.

I know EVGA is a more known brand but the Gamemax is bronze certified and not sure how much of a difference this will make.

Don’t game at all and using a iGPU. Can’t really spend anymore money than this either. Thanks
 

Lutfij

Titan
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The rest of your system's specs will dictate the eventual PSU purchase. Just to be sure, list your specs like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

I'd go for the EVGA though I wouldn't cause my budget to force me to buy a crippled unit as the PSU is considered to be the heart of the system. If it croaks, you loose more than the PSU, rather the entire system with innards.
 
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May 15, 2019
38
0
30
AMD Ryzen 3 2200g
Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000mhz 2x8GB RAM
Gigabyte B450 DS3H
WD Black SN750 NVMe M.2 SSD 250GB
Kingston HyperX Fury 120gb
Gigabyte WB1733D-I WiFi card
Antec DP301M
 
"EVGA 500w" or "EVGA 600w" don't tell us much. Are they BT, W1, N1, or WHAT series or model are they? EVGA makes about six billion different 500-600w models. Ok, that's slightly exaggerated, but you get the idea.

Buying new. What difference would it make spending more money on a different PSU when the EVGA comes with a 3 year warranty and is more than enough Watts for my setup

I'll tell you why it matters. It matters for several reasons.

One, cheap power supplies tend to produce high levels of ripple and have poor voltage regulation, both of which are harmful over time to the REST of your hardware. Motherboard capacitors and other components tend to heat up beyond desirable levels when there is a lot of ripple. All devices tend to work sketchy and can be damaged by excessive voltage fluctuation. They can even trigger errors. Clean, stable power is a necessity for ANY system, whether it has a discreet graphics card or not.

Many premature hardware failures are due, not to manufacturing defects in those components, but to being bombarded by undesirable levels of ripple or constantly out of spec voltage. Not to mention that cheap power supplies tend to use cheap capacitors, which tend to either die early or just out of warranty, meaning you may (And we see this all the time) end up buying three or more cheap power supplies PLUS replacing other hardware that the cheap power supply has slowly damaged to the point where it becomes unusable, over the course of several years when one halfway decent unit would have not only outlasted all three units cumulatively but would have done so without any potential damage to other hardware.

The power supply is easily the single most important component in any build because it is the only component that, when it doesn't work right, NOTHING works right, or at all in some cases.
 
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Yes, W1 series. That's what I figured, but always best to make sure. If you're not running a discreet graphics card, like I said, it's probably ok. MUCH better than the Gamemax dumpster fire unit. Still not great, especially if you add a gaming card at some point, and probably not incredibly likely to live much past the warranty, but maybe. You could do worse.

I'd spend the extra for a better unit, but that's just me.

If you bought a decent unit, you don't need anything near that capacity. A good 350 or 450w unit is MORE than enough for that hardware. But if you plan to add a graphics card at some point, then not only will you want a higher capacity model but you'll want a better quality model as well.

Since you don't game and don't plan to add a graphics card, then go for it if you can actually get one for that price. I don't see any UK vendors listing that model for that cheap, but I'll take your word for it. Sometimes there are sales not reflected in the pricing on PC Partpicker.
 
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