I found this out after I had a PC built for me. After some power issues, the PSU died 18 months later.

I had foolishly accepted the default 600W PSU that was offered. It appears there is a sub-class of "600W builder's PSUs" which have soldered cables instead of plug-in leads. These are ultra-cheap, ultra-nasty and it seems unreliable. They also use soldered-in leads instead of the plug-in ones which are standard now.

Brand manufacturers seem to avoid making a 600W unit. There's 550W, 650W, 750W, etc. OTOH, I could have got another builder's psu for €22.60 & the rest from Amazon.

Yeah, right. Here is a 600W PSU made by Seasonic - as kosher as you can get. https://seasonic.com/prime-fanless-tx

Agree with lvm. You can find crap PSUs at any and every wattage. It's not the wattage; it's the manufacturer.

Yep. Even then you can get 'bad' ones now and then from good manufacturers (less likely though). I had a Corsair go bad within 6 months (got a replacement under warranty). Mine are 750s and 850s.

Well, maybe it's just the outlets I checked, but they all offered a "600W builder's psu" with soldered cables while the better ones had plug-in cables. No other 600W psus were on offer.

Either way, it seems like accepting the default psu is a poor choice. It's rarely a wise business choice for me or anyone in Europe to buy single units online from the Excited States. So we're probably looking at different stuff.

Plugs are just another future failure point. I wouldn't buy one with removable cables. They're labeled "modular", as in more pieces to lose when all are not needed when brand new. After three years, even three months, you want to add another device, and where did all those extra cables go that aren't in the case or soldered to the PSU. Except for a 700 that I inherited and isn't installed anywhere, 550 is the biggest I do have installed, of which I have only one. Everything else is 500 or less. Less is more when more isn't needed, unless the house needs the excess heat anyway.

What you say about plugs is correct only if they're regularly removed. If not, in fact joints to cable or pcb are inclined to be a greater danger point.

The real danger is hand-soldering sockets to a pcb. You have an iron at 350-400°C heating the end of a plastic socket with a melting point of 200°C. Most folks under heat those joints, hence the dry joints. Flow soldering on a pcb is better.

I'm also not worried what folks do with their spare cables. I have them in a box which has all the motherboard spares & handbook. Having only one hand to use has altered my perspective.

Apparently you're not familiar with life in a seacoast environment, where salt in the air affects everything subject to corrosion.

Sea coast? I'll top that. One of the contracts I worked was in a sewage plant. The raw sewage at about 6% solids came into a belt press, where a polymer was added. The solids went into biodegradable "cake," whereas the liquid was pulled off as "filtrate." It was all being computerised and my involvement was in getting a filtrate monitor. Not only were you by the sea, but you had this smell of acid hanging in the air. We had it all in IP67 stuff,but seepage was inevitable during servicing. Not a single plug was replaced.

My place actually doesn't have those problems. Onshore winds are rare as Atlantic weather dominates from the west & south, & I'm on the East. I trust plugs I won't remove.

I used to have to visit a plant which took raw sewage, dried it and made it into pellets to burn at a power station. (Point to note for pub quizzes, poop pellets have a lower energy density than coal!)
Their main server, an HP Proliant ML340 as I recall, had to be backed up via an LT02 tape drive as they didn't have a fast enough network connection for online backups.
Even though the "Computer room" (a cupboard!) had positive pressure air conditioning, the backups would invariably fail due to the tape heads becoming "fouled up" in all cases of the word. We agreed with the customer that we wouldn't be cleaning the heads as we did with all the other drives covered by their contract and would replace the drive as a chargeable job instead. Yup! The smell was something else as well!

Sorry, a bit off topic, nothing to do with power supplies.

Play Bonny!

I never was onsite myself, but the newest engineer was, and I had graphic reports back from him. That was 1989, so attitudes to worker safety were very lax here. I saw all the rotting stuff that came back, and could smell them .

I even got called back to do an input monitor, i.e. the raw sewage. We had the head in a bucket of raw sewage, and it stank out an Industrial Estate! But the LEDs that worked in the filtrate were too colour sensitive for the raw stuff. A redesign to use ultrasound was required, and that was nixed for budgetary reasons.

And it doesn't matter going OT, as the PSU questions are settled.