What is a really good yet inexpensive Power Supply that I can buy? I am looking for a 500-Watt. Thanks

Becareful buying cheap generic power supplies, they have a high failure rate. I think the cheapest power supply I would buy would be a Thermaltake - don't know if they make a 500+ Watt model. If you really want piece of mind, I'd suggest you pony up the dough and get a nice Enermax unit.

This is an old soapbox but always worth a revisit. In one thread, I once saw a post from a guy who replaced his 450W antec with a 300W enermax and his psu problems went away. And another guy who replaced his 400W enermax with a 350w antec and his problems went away. And a guy who swears by $20 generic psu's, claiming he's built 100 systems in the past year with them with no problems. As you dig into it, it becomes clear that psu's fail no matter who you get them from. While I'm sure that the more you pay (meaning the better brand you get), the better chance of getting a reliable supply, it seems as though psu's continue to be a crap shoot below the very high end, which is Power and Cooling. A 500W supply is overkill with less than 5 hard drives, btw. One solution is to buy the cheapest one you can find locally, so you can return it easily if it doesn't work. 99.5% of the time psu's fail they do not fry anything in the process so buying cheap presents a headache risk but few other risks. My preference is to avoid generic but to still buy a low priced brand like powmax, allied, raidmax, etc. No idea if one is better than the other. Then if its loud, to replace the fan with a quiet top motor fan for $3. this is a good place to do business with... http://www.svcompucycle.com/powersupplies.html

average cheap PSUs last 3 years, while the better ones, Antec, Enermax are rated at 10 years, and there was a website, www.tomshardware.com i think that did a PSU burnout test, the cheap ones failed miserably, since many could not supply a constant supply of needed power, some failed, while the Enermax...etc passed with high marks

My read on the Tom's study is different. They found little correlation between price and quality, other than that the worst psu did happen to be the least expensive. The least expensive of the non-generics, Topower, came out upper-middle in the rankings in a tie with Enermax. And this was after they modified the rankings and moved Enermax upwards to this spot. The three that thg then recommended were little known brands (verax, herolchi, foltron) Detracting from the usefulness of this study is the fact that the manufacturers surely sent their "cherry" psu's to Tom's to be tested, which almost invalidates the study since our goal as consumers is to know how often the manuf is producing a dud. Psu's are not consistent from serial number to serial number but you can't test that short of a consumer experience poll. All I can say is a couple months ago a guy wanted me to build him a machine using the cheapest psu I could find so I poured over info and posts for a couple hours and concluded that avoiding the very cheapest was smart, that it was mostly a crap shoot, that there were a bunch of builders out their who used only raidmax or come other cheap brand and yet swore buy them, and that every manuf had their horror stories.