Antec earthwatts EA500 500W Continuous Power ATX12V v2.2 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC "Compatible with Core i7/Core i5" Power Supply

Pros: Simple, solid PSU.

Cons: Wish it had lasted a few years longer. 5 years, for a PSU only lightly used, seems to indicate poor parts/manufacturing.

Pros: Purchased this in Feb 2008 and is still going strong!

Cons: none.

Pros: Lots of people think that if you have a really high end graphics card then you need like an 850W PSU. Those people are crazy....When you have a quality power supply like this one (Which can actually deliver more than its labeled wattage) you can load it up. This thing is powering a 2500K overclocked, 6GB of RAM, an HD 5850 and a 8800GT OC. Runs that no problem. Plus if you were to overload this PSU, it's either going to silently shut down or if it does die, it's not going to take out any of your components unlike all those garbage China power supplies

Cons: Zero

Other Thoughts: Got this for $15 at a local store. What a steal.

Pros: worked great for what i needed it to for the 3+ years i owned it.

Cons: recently upgraded motherboard, cpu, video card, ram...essentially new computer lol and it fried 6 months later. not sure what happened to it, just gave off that burnt smell and was extremely hot.

Other Thoughts: amd athlon x2 7850 kuma black edition (2.8ghz), 6gb ddr2-800mhz ram, xfx radeon hd5770, single hard drive, single dvd-rw multi drive, several USB components

Pros: Its quiet

Cons: It does not work with APC UPS BX1000. Found this out the hard way. After a week on the UPS the computer suddenly switched off. I immediately thought it was something wrong with the APC UPS. So, I returned it to my local OfficeMax and got another APC UPS. This time I conducted a few tests. 75% of the time the computer would shut down when either disconnecting the UPS from power or connecting the UPS back to power.

Then I start researching and apparently this is a really big problem. It has to do with the approximated sine wave that the cheaper APC UPS put out is not compatible with Active PFC found on newer Power Supply Units.

So, if you have no intention of ever plugging your computer into a UPS then get this, it's quiet. Otherwise, if you think you might want to use a UPS one day then stay away from the Antec EarthWatt series.

Pros: if 500w is enough then this is a very good choice.

Cons: none so far.

Pros: Nice and quiet PSU, stable quality Antec product.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: no bottom fan that pulls are in like most PSUs. this one has a rear fan that exhausts that keeps things cool

Pros: I've been looking to upgrade or build a computer for quite some time and the funds just happened to end up in my lap and I had some spare time so I decided to go for it and upgrade an old family desktop. So I've been going through and doing research on motherboards, power supplies, and just about everything under the sun to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into. The first things to upgrade on my list were to add a graphics card and upgrade the power supply.

For the price you really can't ask for more, and the fact that this power supply had all the connections I needed for a rather old motherboard was a great bonus. Easy to install and everything worked in one go and I haven't had any problems with it. It's absolutely quiet and even when under a high load I have no problems with it.

I'm definitely looking forward to using this for quite a while and/or upgrading using the same company in the future.

Cons: The only con that I have (and it's a small enough of one that it's not a deal breaker) is that the power cords are plentiful. Which means that if you're like me and using a rather small case, that suddenly you'll realize that you have a small case. I had to tuck all the unused cords into the empty spare optical bay simply because if left unchecked, it could have covered my cooling fans on my processor and graphics card.

Of course, that's nothing a simple case upgrade couldn't fix, to be honest, so like I said, I'd rather have too much than not enough in this case.

Pros: Quiet, efficient

Cons: This power supply, like many manufactured in the last few years, has Active Power Factor Correction (Active PFC), which makes more efficient use of the supplied power. The purpose of any type of power factor correction is to make more efficient use of the supplied power and to present a more "even" load to the utility company. Another "advantage" of Active PFC is that the power supply automatically adjusts to the input AC voltage (within certain limits), and therefore doesn't need nor have a 110V/220V input voltage selection switch. Unfortunately, many of the Active PFC designs (including this one) are incompatible with the "simulated" sine wave output of most of the lesser-expensive, "consumer-grade" Uninterruptible Power Supplies manufactured today. And most people who purchase a UPS but this type, not realizing that its square output won't work with an active PFC power supply, and may even cause that power supply to burn up!

Other Thoughts: I used this power supply for over 2 years and fought the UPS incompatibility issue, as well as other strange power supply "glitches", that caused my PC to either reboot, power off, or just randomly lock-up. After a couple of years, I bought an expensive "pure sine wave" UPS, and it helped these "glitches", but the new UPS did not totally eliminate them. So I finally gave up on the Antec EA500 power supply and replaced it with a non-PFC model from another manufacturer about 2 months ago - Since then, I haven't had any more PC power problems. I have sworn off both active PFC power supplies and Antec power supplies (I've had 2 others that died), although I still like and use Antec's cases.

Pros: Lasted 4-5 years with increasing load (8600 GTS, 4 SATA Hard Drives running in a Software RAID, 1 IDE hard drive, 2 DVD-RW Drives, P4 2.99GHz, many USB devices).

Cons: Very loud. I don't remember if this was always the case, but it was certainly loud during the end of its life, I noticed a huge improvement in the sound coming from my machine after I replaced it.

Cables are a bit too long for my machine and end up taking up way too much space.

Other Thoughts: It did die, but it lasted 4-5 years which I think is acceptable, and to be honest I may have been pushing it beyond its limits (see above). May have given it a higher rating earlier in its life as it's possible it was quieter before, but my latest memories of it are being very noisy.