Help me choose a new PSU

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I have a three year old PC which is still working pretty well for me. Unfortunately the PSU (Corsair CX600M) has a cheap sleeve bearing fan and is now making annoying sounds. The sounds can be made to stop by disturbing the fan briefly, but the racket returns after a short while.

I am not interested in replacing just the fan. I want to replace the entire PSU with one with nicer (and quieter!) bearings.

My system is fairly modest:

  • ASROCK Z170 PRO
  • i5 6600k
  • GTX960
  • 16GB
  • A few harddrives

I would appreciate any recommendations!

2

Well, I recommend the one I got in 2014. Why? Because it’s a brand I know and like (Corsair) and more importantly, I’ve had this thing for nearly 5 years and it has yet to let me down, nor have I ever heard it or had any issues with the fan. It’s $80 for the 850W version but you could probably go to the 750W or 650W edition and save a few bucks (though I wouldn’t recommend it - some day you may want to upgrade your video card for example, and why buy another PSU then if you do?)

I’m running a GTX 1080 Ti on this without any issues for the past 14 months or so.

EDIT - Okay, so that’s the PSU I got for my mother in law (which is being used to power a 780 GTX right now, and my mother in law and then my son has been using it since I built that, also in 2014) so I stand by what I said before, it’s a great PSU and it is quiet and reliable. However, it’s not the one in my PC, which is instead this guy:

This thing is ultra quiet and I swear by it (and the Corsair is probably a good pick as well). Both are about the same price.

3

I think I went “cheap” when I bought mine, but I show I purchased it in May 2015 and it’s been running strong since…

You don’t ask, but I would go modular. So much easier to work with.

4

I like the Cooler Master V series PSUs.

5

Happy Valley PSU is best PSU.

6

Seasonic has been my go-to PSU brand. They manufacture their own units, and the build quality is excellent (at least on the higher-end models).

That said, EVGA has been running good deals on some of their PSUs lately. I picked up one of these last month to upgrade an old box. Seems well built, and the fan is quiet.

7

I generally go with EVGA myself, but Seasonic is known to be very high quality also. If you mail-in rebates I would go with this guy:

And if not, this one:

8

I’ve used Antec, EVGA and Seasonic (or based on Seasonic since they show up in other brands) with great success thus far. It can be model specific but wow that Antec is in my old system, going on probably around 10 years now. Key though is some of them don’t make it in house so it’s model/OEM specific.

9

Thanks for all the recommendations. It looks like there isn’t much emphasis on the quality of the fan in the low and middle tiers. My relatively cheap PSU was whisper quiet right up until it wasn’t - just after the 3 year warranty expired.

To get a better fan design, you have to go up to the $170+ neighborhood. I would probably be better off getting just getting one of the cheaper ones recommended above and replacing it every couple years when it gets noisy.

10

EVGA should not be that expensive. They are especially fond of selling their PSU’s with a discount too, like all the time sales kind of thing.

13

I see a lot of recommendations for the same or similar PSU I already have, so maybe I just got a dud? Maybe I’ll just keep the PSU and replace the fan after all.