Power supplies and reliability (was: Schröding er's hash)

> I've seen too many hard-to-diagnose problems that disappeared after
> replacing a sketchy PSU.  Random hangs and crashes, hard drive errors, video
> noise, hang on reboot, etc.  I no longer try to go cheap when choosing a PSU
> for builds.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised the hardware hasn't caught on accordingly:
while it's now standard for chips to monitor their temperature (and
adjust their power consumption if it gets too high), I still haven't
seen anything comparable that would detect and report when the input
voltage goes out-of-range (and maybe also take steps to reduce the
instantaneous power consumption?).

Instead, we're in the dark, forced to try to avoid the problem
by over-provisioning the power supply and pray that it was enough.


=== Stefan