Should a run a BEC?

[BrianG]

Yeah, 3s would tax the BEC and cause overheating with decent loads. I did a test a while back, and just a 250mA load on ~3s voltage caused a substantial amount of heat really fast. A couple 5v fans alone could hit that load figure.

The CCBEC is probably the smaller, more powerful, most programmable, and cheapest of the bunch, but there have been reports of some going bad outputting full battery voltage to the servos/receiver. Most don't have that problem from what I've seen, and Patrick (from CC) said any UBEC can do that under the right circumstances. However, I have seen less reports of that type of failure with some of the other brands. A couple good ones are Koolflight, WesternRobotics, and DimensionEngineering. Those three are my favorites because they output very close to their rated voltage, have low/no noise, and retain high efficiency at higher loads.

If you search the general electric forum, I have tested several different BECs and posted the results if you are interested. Just do an advanced search for threads started by me, with the text "test" in the title only...