bought TC-895 i5-10400 during Amazon $397 sale.... but if the ATX12VO power supply goes bad, Acer wi

CornChowder

I bought TC-895 i5-10400 during Amazon $397 sale a month ago.  
I've been looking around for an upgraded ATX12VO power supply.  The one that it comes with is only rated at 300 watts.    There does NOT appear to be anybody making ATX12VO for the aftermarket right now.   

but if the ATX12VO power supply goes bad, Acer will charge me $192 for a replacement!!!???(since it's out of warranty, according to their customer service)  that's just nuts...no?   

by the way, it may be "out of warranty" because I had already upgraded lots of things:  modified the DVD-ROM drive into a SATA SSD drive, installed Noctua CPU cooler, replaced NVMe SSD, RAM, etc...  also modified the power cables via irreversible splicing.....   in addition, the slide-out panel has been cut and a large circular acrylic panel put in place... also cut hole on the top to fit a 120mm exhaust fan.  

kqian111

Wow that's aggressive. Which cooler did you get? What GPU do you have installed?

CornChowder

kqian111 said:

 

Wow that's aggressive. Which cooler did you get? What GPU do you have installed?

Noctua NH-U9S cooler.  The included fan would not work properly because the TC-895's motherboard doesn't have  "real" PWM.  I put a Cooler Master Blade Master 92mm PWM fan on it and it worked fine. At idle, the fan runs around 900 to 1000rpm. At 99% load, the fan runs at 1800rpm.    (even at 99% load for an hour, the CPU temp never reached more than 55 degrees C, which I think is pretty good)

As for graphics, I've been trying a few different one and haven't figured out which one to keep yet.  None of them work well with 2160p monitor, so I may end up exchanging it for a 1440pm monitor next week.

kqian111

You can really OC the CPU with that CPU cooler! It's overkill for the 65w CPU. I have the Core i5 9600k (95w) CPU installed and with a tower cooler similar to yours, barely gets above 65C under gaming load. Get Argus Monitor. I found it super useful to control the fan curve of the CPU and case fans connected to the mobo. It'll override the BIOS's default fan curve settings which I found pretty useless (it wouldn't kick up until the CPU reached 70C+).

The PSU is the limiting factor to your GPU upgrade options. I imagine a GTX 1650 without a 6 pin power connector should work and able to push 4k no problem.

HMonk

New to the forum and, passing by, I noticed your post and am wondering if this is just a discussion or do you have a question? Without challenging your choices, I do wonder why buy a machine off the shelf and then expend (considerable) resources in apparent upgrades. However, if your current PSU is doing the job, why are you concerned about it failing at some point? Or if you are unhappy with the 300W (in conjunction with anticipated failure) why not continue your upgrades and get a different PSU - perhaps a minimum of 600W (more-?) in anticipation of more energy-demanding upgrades? Again, just wondering.

Monk 

CornChowder

HMonk said:

New to the forum and, passing by, I noticed your post and am wondering if this is just a discussion or do you have a question? Without challenging your choices, I do wonder why buy a machine off the shelf and then expend (considerable) resources in apparent upgrades. However, if your current PSU is doing the job, why are you concerned about it failing at some point? Or if you are unhappy with the 300W (in conjunction with anticipated failure) why not continue your upgrades and get a different PSU - perhaps a minimum of 600W (more-?) in anticipation of more energy-demanding upgrades? Again, just wondering.

Monk 

there doesn't seem to be a ATX12VO power supply anywhere right now... (other than the replacement part from Acer)    or am I wrong?

kqian111

CornChowder said:

HMonk said:

New to the forum and, passing by, I noticed your post and am wondering if this is just a discussion or do you have a question? Without challenging your choices, I do wonder why buy a machine off the shelf and then expend (considerable) resources in apparent upgrades. However, if your current PSU is doing the job, why are you concerned about it failing at some point? Or if you are unhappy with the 300W (in conjunction with anticipated failure) why not continue your upgrades and get a different PSU - perhaps a minimum of 600W (more-?) in anticipation of more energy-demanding upgrades? Again, just wondering.

Monk 

there doesn't seem to be a ATX12VO power supply anywhere right now... (other than the replacement part from Acer)    or am I wrong?

That's accurate. No aftermarket PSU for this new standard yet.