Raidmax hot-to-the-max

On Wednesday I went into my home office and was greeted by the smell of burning wire insulation. Not something you want to smell in your home believe me. I traced the origin to the 450 watt power supply that was in my Raidmax computer case. The PS was overheating because both of the fans on the unit had stopped working. The computer is only 18 months old and you wouldn't expect both fans to fail like that.

I did some checking and found out that Raidmax supplies are not very well rated. You can still buy a retail version of this model for around 23 bucks. A good power supply will cost two or three times that amount. When I was shopping for the case, my only concern was that the power supply had enough juice for a P4 system and that the case had a clear panel with cool lighting. As you can see from the photo, I replaced the PS with a 400 watt model from AGI. This one has a large fan on the bottom and dual sata power plugs. I have no idea how long the Raidmax supply would have kept running without a fan, but at least it didn't damage any of the other components in the case. With millions of computers out there, running day and night, it's surprising that we haven't heard about more problems like this.