While the Antec SmartPower and TruePower series were priced like top-quality power supplies, and while they were high-quality units otherwise, they did suffer ffrom a few design issues. The first issue was the use of low quality Fuhjyyu (I hope I spelled that right) capacitors. They were unreliable and very sensitive to heat. To add to the use of these heat-sensitive capacitors, these powerful, hot-running power supplies had temperature-controlled fan(s), for quieter operation. The fans would run faster when the power supply was hot, and either run very slowly or not at all when the power supply was under low load. The problem with that is that the temperature was measured at a certain point on one of the power supplies' internal heatsinks, so even if other component got hot, the fans wouldn't speed up. Also, even though Antec did use high-quality primary capacitors in some of the models (it seems to vary) they only use 85c parts, so the capacitors would still fail.
Of course you could argue that it wasn't Antec's fault that the OEM (the company that actually made the power supplies) they chose, Channel Well Tech, also known as CWT, used these faulty parts and was responsible for other problems. I spoke to a very nice Antec representative, and he told me that Antec was one of the only power supply manufacturers whose engineers worked closely with the OEM, (Delta, Seasonic, CWT), to design the power supplies, instead of simply choosing, for example, a Seasonic X-Series power supply, and painting it a different color and sticking an Antec logo on it. Whether is is true, this seems to simply push the blame more toward Antec.
There were many different models of Antec power supplies that had these problems. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head:
-SmartPower
-SmartPower 2.0
-SmartPower Blue
-True
-TruePower
-TruePower Blue
-TruePower 2.0
or any other variants. All wattages from 300-550w (as far as I can tell) were affected. Some common model number prefixes were SLxxx, SPxxx, TPxxx.
These power supplies can damage your computer. The power supplies can have voltages either too high or too low or have out-of-spec ripple and noise, damaging other components in your PC along with damaging the capacitors on your motherboard as well.
If you have one of these, I suggest you take it out of service or replace the capacitors immediately.
Please note that I am NOT affiliated with Antec or any of its competitors in any way!
