Sparkles are reasonably decent economy power supplies. More recently, the Sparkle logo is used by CodeGen and the PSUs are coming labelled as CodeGens.

See if the PSU is rated ATX 2.03. If still in doubt, get into AMD's products area on their website and look withint the config info on the part of products that deals with your CPU series. Then look st brand names and LeadTek is one and Antec is anohter and PC P&C is another that pops up. Codegens have the 2.03 rating, and if you look at the details of the specs on CodeGen's website you will see that they have decent amperage specs for each leg (voltage level they output) and you will see that they are decent at not shifting voltages badly under load if you have used them. The 400 Watt and 500 Watt PSUs are better quality in terms of RMAs than the 350's or down as they (bigger ones) were designed for high-end workstations and servers and thus make great OC and gamer box PSUs and half load to 3\4 rated max can run all day with no hassles. Load them to the point that they draw 90% of load adn booting will become a problem-- you see, when a computer is booting it can pull 1.2 to 1.8 times the load it normally runs with, as CD-ROM and HDs and DVD and other things all activate at once from an at rest state. Once running, these things might not need as much power all at the same time-- and usually you do not get them all having to start at once while running the box.

You ever heard the idea that flourescent lights take 10 times as energy to turn on as to run??? This actually has some truth. The BALLASTs in Flourescent fixures act similarly to wet cell batteries except they lose charge when electricity is NOT present. Computer power supplies have what are called Capacitors in them. When the computer starts the PSU is trying to charge the capacitors (which drain when grounded and not fed electricity actively and in this one way behave like Ballasts exccept they charge and release energy dioferent so they do not take as much juice as flourescent ballasts do to charge) AND feed all kinds of voltages in large amounts (watts) all at once. If a PSU booted you box and now doesn't and someone who is good with computers says it is damaged, it probably is-- it is just not completely broken yet but is not cheap enough to repair that you would want to-- so you might as well replace it with one that provides 1.7 times the wattage your parts say they need or figure on doign it again every 6-18 months until you do get a bigger one. Also, buy a 400 Watt if you have a big case, or even a 500 if can afford , it will save you buying a bigger one when you upgrade if you get a good ATX 2.03 at 500 watts now.

John Danielson.