Isn’t “reuse the PSU” kind of a tempting trap? I though it was—a cheap part that can take down the rest of your expensive system. I though the advice was to get a new one with each build…
Isn’t “reuse the PSU” kind of a tempting trap? I though it was—a cheap part that can take down the rest of your expensive system. I though the advice was to get a new one with each build…
A quality PSU can often last 10 years and multiple builds. Quality in this case just means "has things like over voltage protection, proper wiring included, decent caps, and decent voltage regulation" not "was really expensive". E.g. that $140 85 W Seasonic Focus tier is quality in this regard, the $80 no-name 850 W PSU is what people warn about, and the $400 Seasonic Prime titanium rated PSU is mostly for those scrutinizing VRM designs or wattage limits on the cables to the GPU for their overclock goals.
It's common to upgrade your PSU anyways though as it seems like parts wattages only go up over the years (particularly for the +12v rails) or one may want to cycle out the old system completely for reuse/resale. Generic advice (since most people buy cheapo no name PSUs and upgrade rarely) might be to say to replace just to be on the good side of every situation... but if you're one that knows you got a quality PSU or likes to upgrade your build every other CPU generation, then swapping out the PSU every time is likely a waste.
If the PSU is that crappy, then yes. But these things are supposed to come with over voltage protection, current limiters, resettable fuses etc at the output. Even bad ones are not supposed to cascade their failure to the rest of the system.
But let's think of a better option. What if all spare parts came with an expiry date and a service schedule? On top of giving us a baseline to retire the part, the manufacturer will also be forced to divulge an indirect quality score (useful lifetime) and compete with others on it. If this sounds too fantastic, we sort of had this in operation half a century ago. I don't think a lot of people remember that era.
Oh neat, I was not aware. In the 70’s then, computer parts came with an expiration date? I wonder why they stopped, was it a tradition inherited from car, radio, or appliance parts, or something, where the idea of a wear-part is (or at least was) somewhat more developed?
I've been on the same PSU for I think 13 years now, its currently running my Ryzen 7 3700x and RTX4070 desktop. I suppose if its not a great quality PSU or its already suspected of causing issues then replacing is a good idea.