PROJECT SEED BOX (PSU)

Today's project involves a Dell Dimension 4700 that was considered a total loss and given to the King as  a gift for trying to work his magic on it.  That is, work his magic without investing any money into said project.  However, it just could not be done.  There appears to be an issue with either the Power Supply, the RAM, or possibly the Motherboard.  My intuition tells me that the problem is with the Power Supply and so that is where we will start investing into this project.  In searching for a proper, but hopefully cheap Power supply I came across many very cheap power supplies from makers such as GenMax, A-Power, Logisys, and Blue Star, just to name a few.  I do not know from experience whether any of these are truly bad power supplies or not.

This is what a basic Dell Dimension 4700 looks like.

So due to my lack of experience with these sub $20 PSU's, I decided it may be best to read some reviews of some of these things because in restrospect, I recall someone saying that there are many bad power supply manufacturer's out there.  So in my research I found that many people found these to be crappy and not last long at all.  In fact, it soon made me worried, that if I were to put one of these cheapy PSUs into one of my computers it might end up killing the computer or possibly burning down the house.

So after some more reading I came to the conclusion that the best option for me is to get a Corsair PSU.  The exact model that I am considering getting runs at about $45.  It is the Corsair Builder Series CX430 V2 430W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply.  That sure is a mouthful isn't it?  It is probably a little more PSU than I need, but it is relatively cheap and should be sufficient for powering this computer which I really only plan on using as a SEED BOX or possibly a computer for anyone else to use aside from myself.

As part of my initial project which was to fix this computer for a friend, I ended up dismantling the computer down to basically a motherboard sitting inside a case.  So I am considering reassembling everything so I can dismantle it again and take pictures in the process to help show those of you who are afraid to take on a task like this.  Once you know how to take everything apart, it is very easy.  But when you don't know, it can take a bit of fiddling with to figure out how to remove some parts.  When we return to this project I will show you how to easily take each part out with ease.  You see our next step is to replace the PSU and in order to do that, the heatsink over the processor had to be removed first. So why not just take pretty much everything out and get it all clean and start over as if this machine is brand new once again!

Now mind you, if this PSU that I am considering purchasing does not fix the problems, we may need to replace the motherboard, but I am going with my gut instinct first which tells me that the source of the problems is the power supply.  Next time, I will elaborate on the problems that this particular machine was having.

This is what my Dell Dimension looked like inside before I removed most of the internals.