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New 1 Kilowatt PSU - Too Much Power?
Steve from Hexus writes "While at the GC 2005 gaming convention in Leipzig, Germany, Hexus.net encountered a new 1kW PSU from Enermax, called the 'Galaxy'. At peak output it will use 1.4kW of mains power to provide a total of 66 amps across its various power rails. Who will actually have a need for this PSU, and when this amount of power is being consumed, shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems (or perhaps energy efficiency) instead?"
now I can get that USB powered Stargate I've had my eye on.
shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems (or perhaps energy efficiency) instead
Who said you were the target audience for this product? I am sure if you want to buy one enermax won't say, nah you're goofy for spending money on this everyone knows that a 250 watt compusa generic brand works for just as good. This is, just maby, a stab at a *server* or it will be required for the next high end Nvidia card. I just hope that the goofs at work don't come in boasting about their new 1000 watt(!) power supply staring the next arms race right after the mega hertz debacle has ended.
Sounds just large enough to power my Peltier cooled, integrated beer cooler
shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems
What? Two 1 kilowatt supplies? That'll save lots of power.. great idea!
Trolling is a art,
Have to keep up with those Intel CPUs ...
Seriously though, bigger machines have been using far more power for years. Although my 6 CPU Sun box only eats 875W.
1000 watts
1400 watts peak output
66 amps
1 quintic polynomial post
2005, 1000, 1400, 66 and 1 are the zeroes of
One point twenty-one jigawatts?!
400 watts of overhead? isn't that absolutely terrible efficiency? i mean pc power and cooling released a 800w one that drew about 950 watts from the socket(i think it got /.'ed too) but thats a 150 watt diffrence, not a 400watt diffrence..
...I want one to compensate for something. My 550w enermax PSU makes me feel inferior and self concious now. I mean, I bring a girl to my room and she sees my puny PSU, what the hell am I going to do then? "Well, at least I have a large RAID" Yeah right.
are the only words I understood in the summary and I have no idea what Hexus is. I don't think I will even dare to read the article.
Seriously... this is getting insane, POWER EFFICIENCY people, Jesus.. they can make fast laptops that run on low juice is it so freaking hard to take some of that tech into the big rig world ?
On a side note I've had 3 accounts here, and hey none of them work! yay me!
Time to go kill someone...
FTA:"...but of course, you could just be future proofing, or compensating for something... "
Sure, I'll be compensating for my ice-cold burrito by running a microwave oven off the USB.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This is easily the dumbest goddamn commentary ever on slashdot.
If someone has intense computational or data storage needs, then they just may need this new 1KWH PSU.
The cheapest shittiest car on the planet goes through 100KWH, 100 times more. And there are hundreds of millions of those, a good number of which are running simultaneously.
Yes, some computational needs require 1KWH. In fact, lots of them. Enough mindless hand-wringing commentary from the desperately uninformed editors..
I use PC power supplies for other stuff because they are VERY cheap when compared to general purpose power supplies from electronics places. 66A at 12V will run a nice little 5-axis home built CNC mill. The "proper" power supply for something like this would be way out of my budget.
I'm waiting for the PSU that's hardwired to the 220 mains.
This is, just maby, a stab at a *server* or it will be required for the next high end Nvidia card.
Why on earth would you use this in a server? In a server environment you are probably going to be much more concerned with redundancy and energy efficiency, the two things notably lacking here.
No, this thing is squarely directed at people uncomfortable with the size of their penis.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I concur in the hope that this doesnt turn into another mhz race. Although that will make smaller PSU's cheaper still so go ahead :D
Probably high-end workstations, where you'll see 2 power-hungry processors pulling full load, busy disks, and a big graphics card.
It'll be purchased by a bunch of 18-25 year olds, but that's fine - let them drive the price down.
I imagine it should warm up some cold dorm rooms running Seti@Home or WorldCommunityGrid or something (mostly useless) like that...
Video for Online Dating Profiles
~DOCSANE
I'm no majestic mathematician, but consider the resources that would be required to run the US gamer population's horde of Battlefield 2 "Redux" gaming systems.
Broken out in terms of natural resources, rather than mere watts, that's an unimaginable lot of coal, trees and recycled veggie oil. But then, who's counting?
Perhaps hydrogen power will first see take-up not as a form of household energy, but instead a form of power to supply the generation-next with adequate MHZ speed for their immersive 3D thriller =>
The problem is that most people work off the maximum wattage draw of all the components in their system, and add it up, and think "Ooh, I need a 900 watt power supply!".
Its complete bollocks.
A mate and I went to Akihabara to buy him a new PC. He had loads of money to burn on it, and burn he did. Dual core Athlon 64, 8 - yes, Eight, SATA-II 320GB drives, a raid card, 2 x GeForce 7800s (I think thats the model?), a SLI capable motherboard, etc etc...
And the guy came over and tried to sell him this really ugly loud monster PSU (700 watts) for it. We looked at it, and then at the 420 Watt power supply that had all the SATA power we needed, plus the power for the SLI, plus everything else.
It came with some software to see what the power draw is.
He set it all up. How much its drawing? Even when he is hammering the RAID5 volumes as hard as he can, he still only draws about 300watts.
Do we need 1KW PSUs? no. I don't think so. Not unless your machine has something like 30 drives in it, and good luck finding a case that fit that many.
More likely, however, is that it's being done for bragging rights. Dodge, for example, put the Viper into production, even though the small margins add very little to their ledger. The reason was that it lifted the brand up as a whole; other models, as horrible as they are, became a little more cool through association.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
"Good for servers, but no one needs this much CPU power in the home."
Time to act like responsible people and not buy computers that require that kind of horse power. We should be encouraging intelligent innovations, not brute for innovations. The answer to everything should be more transitors/power.
After me and a friend were constantly upgrading to keep up with each other and escalating the arms race I just decided to start taping 20 dollar bills on the side of my computer, I couldn't take it anymore. Only down side was that he would peel them off my case and make fun of me some more.
This thing will probably trip a standard 15 amp breaker.
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
Now we know the real reason of why Apple is switching to x86. I knew that "Intel is better" crap was just a smokescreen.
Did you know that by now 10% of current electricity usage in the US is needed for computers? At different times I have very changing opinions when I hear such a news item. To use 1 KW for playing games sounds pretty awful. But to use maybe even more power at the datacenter where your ISP is located to take care of your teleworking sounds like a good deal (compared to the gas your car needs for commuting).
Still I'm pretty horified to think about all those kilowatts being used for Clippy or other features on our desktops that nobody ever asked for but that demand faster chips, mor storage, higher clockspeeds and fast increasing power consumption, etc.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
When this PSU hits the shelves, it's going to be just in time for winter!
Yayh for heaters!
According to http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Preview s/G70preview/11.html, an Nvidia 7800GTX draws 244 watts under full load. If you wanna go with SLI, you'll need at least 490 watts to power the video cards alone. And if you can afford that, you'll probably have plenty of other power-sapping toys and fans too.
550W will handle a dual core Athlon, dual 7800 GTXs, 4 SATA drives, 2 optical drives, and a decent number of case fans, at peak load.
I guess, since you specified Intel, you might need an additional 100W, but thats still just 2/3s what this thing outputs.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
the new thing is two big graphics cards
I'm sure theres a market out there somewhere for this, and those people will graciously recieve this product as exactly what they've been looking for. However I'm more interested in smaller, quieter PC's as the next evolutionary step. Given the processing power of today's PC's, the need to keep pushing hardware to obtain that last piece of performance has been removed, and its more beneficial to see if the computer can run more slightly more slowly but with very little noise.
Business Voyeur
That'll dim lights. Maybe someone will release a USB powered magnetron tube and I can also use my PC for a microwave oven!
Definitely dual processor systems.
I used to have an Antec 550W PSU, powering my WS with a K8WE, and 2 mid range Opterons.. and for a while I thought having to wait 20-30s before my PC would start after pressing the power button is *normal*
Apparently not so, the moment I got a PC Power and Cooling 850W PSU, the system powers up immediately.
At this point I still do not have any explaination for it, but seeing all those capacitors on the K8WE, perhaps it needs to *charge* them all up somehow before starting, and the old PSU is just too short of juice to do that?
Just a crazy explaination with no basis behind it probably, but the fact remains, a good PSU matters! Get a good PSU for your PC today!
*PS: I'm not from PC Cooling, but their PSUs really made me change the way I look at offerings from "Antec" and other such brands, I used to think Antec was great... but I did learn that it really is just a rebadged ChannelWell.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I can finally build my Linux powered Arch Welder case mod!
Appropriate. Multiple processor mainboard possibly with dual core chips, AGPPlus and PCIe video cards, and then on varied hard disk drive arrays for swap and production easily could use two of these power supplies to replace four or more lower powered supplies and maintain redundancy of power.
If it looks like a troll, and smells like a troll, its got to be an intel fanboi!
Note the 'almost' in the parent post. Besides, you forgot about the power-hungry flashing neon lights and sirens in the case mod!
HAH! I just wasted a second of your life making you read this, but I wasted a minute of mine thinking it up. DAMN.
Oh, and REAL nerds have recognized that that polynomial has no nonreal roots, and probably checked it by expanding (x-1)*(x-66)*(x-1400)*(x-1000)*(x-2005).
...And a 50 amp breaker that your stove top or water heater runs on.
moox. for a new generation.
It'll handle a 75w peltier element and a watercooling system on top of that.
And will still be a ways from maxing out a 550w PSU.
I guess the next craze in home computing is going to be Quad motherboards, each running quad processors with geforce SLIs.
I assume that 1.21 jigawatts is when James Watt does 1.21 jiggs?
I'm not so sure, but 1.21 n***awatts is how much power it takes to send my white ass black to the futa.
What does a powerpc G4 use? 25 watts? I think?
This is insane and something is fishy if x86 hardware is this demanding.
Are the components filled with gobs of transistors and poor quality capacitators which use more power?
To me anything over 300 watts should not exist for a pc. After all the new PS3 which is about as powerfull as a pc if not more uses what? 90 watts?
http://saveie6.com/
Well, I haven't seen too many 650 watt PSUs, but remember the unit isn't going to pull more wattage than it's using, so a little overkill won't be environementally wasteful.
The price on the other hand...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
check this baby out for example:
l
:) )
quad processor, with support module to add another 4, with dual core support... I am planning on getting this for a 3d rendering workstation at work:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.htm
Now imagine this fully populated, with a few TB array at 10W per drives, it goes up fast to 1Kw...
I'm planning on getting one of those for a specific 3D application where I need several cpus inside the main machine (render nodes wouldn't be as efficient) so I was actually wondering if there were a lot of 800W+ psus out there... interresting.
(please don't argue about the fact that 10 pcs would cost less blablalba, this is beyond the scope of this message, question was is there a use, yes there is
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
1000 watts divided by 66 amps is 15.151515 volts on average. Assuming normal 3.3, 5, 12 volt connections chew up some of those 66 amps, does this thing have a high voltage DC output for some unusual application?
No, we should concentrate on what matters: Actively-cooled Nomex loungewear with IV hydration systems to keep users from dying of heat exhaustion. (The noise-canceling headphones are already available.)
In case you wondered, it's too late: I already filed a patent application for sensing devices coupled into ACPI to throttle the system when the user overheats.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You're confusing Wattage with Amperage. The two are not equivalent. Additionally, the 1kW value on this particular PSU is the PEAK usage. IN all likelyhood the system it is installed in will never draw that many watts.
I've had prototype Itanic systems on a 15 watt circuit with 5 other (non-Itanic) machines and not tripped the breaker until I accidentally plugged in a coffee maker on the same circuit.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I for one welcome our new super-powered over-lords... too much?
I can personally see the advantage. The faster the PC the more I get done. Energy is cheap -- until the price gets unmanageable, I'll use it to my work advantage. Solar, wind, whatever -- the costs prove we don't need them yet. I suffer with slower machines. 8 years ago I had 6 PCs churning out my work. Now I have my beast server and my Pocket PC Phone as my sole client. 1000W sounds like a dream -- more drives, faster response, and more productivity. Less frustration waiting, too.
And by "Galaxy" they mean that every hour it draws enough power to require the consumption of a micro-galaxy, like the kind you find in a marble from the first Men in Black. Everytime you power on your system it is "As if a million souls cried out in torment..." The Jedis are going to be mad about this one.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
So I don't go deaf from the fan noise?
I agree with some of the other posters that have said we should be focussing on reducing power consumption. Things like AMD's Cool 'n Quiet are a step in the right direction, but we need a return to the days when you could get by with passive cooling. (pre IBM PC, and early laptops)
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Is someone trying to bring back those old "vacuum tube" super-computers?
This sig is better than nothing!
I've seen quite a few PC power supplies replaced by the PC repair tech at work. Clearly something is wrong there. The machines I work on almost never lose their PS. It's either due to better engineering or OVERengineering, and I like to believe the latter. (tho I imagine some PSs are better protected against spikes and surges than others?)
I prefer to overengineer anything to do with power supplies, since they tend to run hot when near their limit, and can only run for so long at that level (which may be well within their specs) before they smoke.
That, and having a little extra reserve is nice in case you want to hook up an extra pair of HDs, try out that new video card with the box fan attached to it, or add a few christmas trees worth of lights to the case. That's also likely a PS that will be the one original thing still IN that case six years from now.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I have, in my basement, a Sun 4/670MP.
Engraved on the side of the power supply: 975W
Date on the manufacturing plate: 1983
'bout time PCs caught up.
/~mikeg
15 *WATT* circuit? That barely powers a decent light bulb and you powered 6 systems off of it?
I think you mean 15 Amp, which is standard household current in the US.
1.21 kilowatts! Tom, where am I going to get that kind of power?!
Maybe this is just what the Super Door Of The Future and its System needs to operate!
/ 21/1519237&tid=126&tid=137
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08
Who said you were the target audience for this product? I am sure if you want to buy one enermax won't say, nah you're goofy for spending money on this everyone knows that a 250 watt compusa generic brand works for just as good
p ly_Calculator.php?cmd=INTELp ly_Calculator.php?cmd=AMD
Does it? I totally can not agree. I don't have anything resembling a gamer machine, just a simple asus a7v333 with amd 2800xp, pair of drives, a few cards, and ati 9600 video. That 250watt compusa generic powersupply does NOT cut the mustard. It looks like it works but I've established that most of my intermitent problems were a result of a lame power supply. My biostar motherboard (VIP) wouldn't even post with a generic 250watt compusa generic powersupply. Hell it rejected a 400watt PS.
250watts at 70% efficency, assuming that's even accurate is 175watts.
Below are generic numbers based on what I aproximate what my consumption is.
CPU--- about 70 watts [2ghz P-IV or high end AMD K7)
Video card about 40 watts [Geforce FX 5200 or ATI 9600)
Drives about 25 watts each [CD-rom spinup is typicaly about 30 watts]
PCI cards about 5 watts each
Memory about 10 watts each
Fans about 2 watts each.
Even with just one hard drive I'm so close to 175 watts it's not even funny. Two drives and Rom spin up.. I'm over 175watts without a doubt. While I'm sure the 250 watt generic compusa P/S might work in cases that have a modest video card, one drive, and modest power consuming CPU it's easy to see you might need more than that compusa 250watt PS.
This is not taking into account max power per voltage line, which the 3.3v in older power supplies might be limited to 14A (46.2watt).
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/Power_Sup
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/Power_Sup
Check for your self what you have and what PS is reccomended.
I agree 1KW is double or tripple what even a hard core gamer would need.... and is probally not money well spent, but neither is that 250watt compusa power supply. A fool and their money are soon parted.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I've had prototype Itanic systems on a 15 watt circuit with 5 other (non-Itanic) machines and not tripped the breaker until I accidentally plugged in a coffee maker on the same circuit.
Now who's confusing watts and amps?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
A kilowatt is a bit light-weight for a toaster, but on the other hand it doesn't need highly filtered DC in several different voltages, so the power supply can look suspiciously like the power cord used by other power supplies...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was thinking of using this to power my car - gas is getting kinda high...
Maybe I can jam it into a hybrid and get a few extra hundred miles out of the tank...
Get your Unix fortune now!
I think he's confusing wattage with amperage.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
You must have missed that new 8 way Tyan opteron board, sweet jesus I want one and a 7800 (no SLI on this board for some reason).
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
I can imagine this site is going to be /.ed any moment now -- it's already feeling slow for me. Here's the full article text. Unfortunately, no images, which was the best bit of the article :(
More power to the people from Enermax
Enermax... those crazy power supply dude guys have gone power mad with power and madness with their latest bit of kit bits, the Galaxy... set to be available in the USA from around October, the Galaxy is the first PSP to retail market claiming able to deliver 1400W... yes, you read that right, 1000W...
In final production at the time of writing, the two samples in the photos are engineering samples for engineering so we couldn't get out hands on one for tested... but having to run the figures past Rys, they add up to just a little... not really, actually more than 1000W output, drawing 1400W from the mains... so no need for a dimmer switch in the lounge anymore... or the kitchen, or other rooms or lights...
In fact, other than rocking up a huge electricity bill, it's hard to see how you're ever going to need 1000W inside yourself... unless you're a freak with who likes to let of five loads inside your machine with a kettle, electric fire and table saw attached to the appendage you have to wonder why you'd need a 1000W PSU... but of course, you could just be future proofing, or compensating for something, like a small penis...
Seriously, if that's the case we're in deep shit.
The reason is that constant-power loads like PSUs and "smart" motors have a negative-resistance load curve. Negative resistance load curves have another name in electrical engineering:
Unstable.
If the electric utility gets even close to a brownout, the PSUs suck even more current. Which in turn drops the voltage to them, which in turn ....
Net result: breakers tripping all over the place. Which in turn causes a ripple blackout all over the Grid, since the Grid doesn't respond remotely as fast as those PSUs do.
Sleep tight. Have happy dreams.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We have 4 of 2kW PSUs in a blade server at work. Granted... they can run 14 maxed out servers, so I guess it's not that bad. Runs off 240V as well...
Beleive it or not I like AMD a lot. I am simply noting that their chips are used to run a bit hotter than their intel conterpart (did not say anything about the speed/compute power though)
I am speaking about a set of quads amd opterons with 8G each. You cannot not love those machines...
No, this thing is squarely directed at people uncomfortable with the size of their penis.
Not at all! It's not that I'm uncofmortable with the size of my penis, it's that I need 1.21 kilowatts to power the flux capacitor on my not-penis-related motorcycle with a V8 engine.
>This thing will probably trip a standard 15 amp breaker.
1.4kW of mains power @ (i assume) 110v is aprox. 12.3 amps because:
volts * amps = watts
therefore:
watts / volts = amps
1400 / 110 = 12.73 aprox.
That's not quite 85% of the circuit's rated load. It'd be fine so as long as you give it it's own circuit, like you do for microwaves.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
Rail gun.
That's funny right there. I don't care who ya are.
Did he ever make fun of you for your little-kid grammar?
>> Get a good PSU for your PC today!
pretty good advice, I'd say.
I've had a P.S. die, fry the traces right off the mainboard & cook half the components in the computer. Made me an instant believer in buying decent P.S....
People will put serious money into their CPU, RAM, Video etc but insist on buying a $20 dollar piece of crap to run it all. Or worse yet a $80 dollar piece of crap that has LED fans. (Hint: If it doesn't weigh any more than the no name P.S. your replacing, it probably isn't any better. Like the russian dude in Snatch says: "The weight, it is sign of reliability")
http://request-header.info
actually, 400W will be enough for those, provide that the rating is true 400W
If you look at data centers, a High Density rack with blades takes from 10-16KW of draw for 60! or more servers with 120! or more CPUs. I know draw VS ratings is a big gap sometimes, but if this is the pattern for home computing, those of us building a new home may want to consider a raised floor environment for our home office with computer room air conditioning.
1KW = 3413 BTUs That's over 1/4 ton of cooling required for one device. (@ rated capacity)
Hopefully, someone will come out with a MR. Fusion.
STFU & GBTW
That is two boards (mother and daughter) with two powersupplies too.
You still won't need this monster.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
What about a component of a Raid Array box? 4 raid cards attached to 4 HDD's each, can draw a lot of juice.
The ______ Agenda
to see the article that comes out shortly after one of these PSU's blow a capacitor killing everyone in the house. Kill-a-watt.
The power is going to need to be dissipated in some way. The heat loading on this system is going to be tremendous. At 1.4 KW the heat demand is 7880 Btu/hr. In air conditioning load this would be .4 Ton, running continuously.
Maybe the computer needs to be encapsulated and sunk to the bottom of a lake of a swimming pool just to bleed off excess heat.
Tisha Hayes
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Probably the same reason it won't have "overclocking features" - ie: there's not much overlap between the group of people who want $1500 Quad-CPU motherboards (that take $700ea CPUs) and those who want l33t SLI-video "gaming rigs".
What do you need a kW for, a USB hair dryer? Might have to put in another outlet just for that baby.
What is wattage? You were probably thinking of power.
That's even worse then when people say amperage when they mean current. This could all be avoided if people used potential difference instead of voltage, then they wouldn't think the word has to end in 'age'.
-You're only as clean as your towel.
Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer, larger supplies actually be more efficient?
What I'd like to see is a power supply unit with two parallel internal supplies, one with a much lower max rating than the other, so that when the computer is on stand-by or other times when it is not actually using much power, it can switch to the lower capacity unit, thus saving overhead power losses. Most power supplies are about 70% efficient at _full_ load, and much less so at part load. This would make a heap more sense than one 1000W unit.
Electronic stimulation isn't as effective as you'd think.
*cough*
Seems extravagent, but now you could install an A/C unit in the case and be blowing COLD air over your heat exchanger surfaces instead of ambient-temperature air. Probably necessary for those 16-core Pentiums that are supposed to be here in a few years...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Oops, now I've gone and given them some ideas.
but then the psu goes out and takes the whole thing with it :-(
Your system often peaks out wattage within the first few seconds of power-on.
The HD's spin up is a real killer, often taking magnitudes more power to spin up from 0rpm than when they are crusing along at 7400rpm.
If your HD's spin up power + Video + CPU = > PSU can put out some bad things can happen.
Sometimes your system won't boot, because the CPU was starved for power while it was trying to "come up", same goes for the video card, etc.
HD spin up really sucks.
Add in all the Fan's in your case trying to spin up from 0RPM too...
Yes, my oh my you can use up a PSU.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Considering we had power issues with a system we built at work (DUAL 7800GTX, dualcore Athlon 64, 3 hard drives, 2 optical, etc etc etc), i would think a thousand watt power supply isnt such a bad idea!!
It's perfect for the quad-dualcore opteron box with 32GB of ram and a pair of Nvidia 7800's on SLI with 4 160GB/16MB cache HDD's in Raid 5. Of course thats just my gamer. I'll need two more when I build the server.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
... table saw attached to the USB ...
:P
Wow! All I need now is USB-compatible lathe.
Almost plausible that you might nead it, maybe. But this power supply isn't the right way to get it. It outputs 1000w, and draws 1400w. At peak that is. That is an efficiency of 71%, a hell of a lot worse than a good power supply with PFC. Overall a pretty big waste of power; I'd rather wait for another company to put out a 1kw power supply that isn't quite so inefficient.
Enough with the people who don't get scale, ok?
t atistics_annual_report/2001/html/chapter_03.html)
Your average 100hp car, motorbike, whatever, puts out about 75,000W - 75kW. This is at an efficiency of maybe 25% if you are lucky. So there's 300kW of power right there - so you can blow through a lot of juice on that little car of yours.
Now, my poison of choice is turbocharged 4 bangers that make about 300hp, give or take how it's feeling on any one day. 300hp at a 25% efficiency figure, which is HIGH - is about 900kW, or almost a MEGAWATT of energy. I guess that's why I burn through gas so fast on lapping days!
Imagine what a 200hp SUV making a horrible 15% efficiency is sucking back there cruising down the highway, eh? How many cars are on the road? Now, for s*its and giggles, work out how many 1MW windmills you'd need to make up the energy consumption assuming a daily use a 1h for all 230,000,000 vehicles on the road in the USA in 2000.
(http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_s
This makes that piddly little 1kW supply - which, by the way, is probably operating near 80% efficiency - look piddly in comparison. It's almost a joke.
Similar figures work for things like air conditioning systems - just massive amounts of energy.
Energy is VERY cheap right now. It is imperative that we make use of that cheap energy to discover new ways to make more energy, before some very nasty problems appear in the next 20 years. Conservation is not an option anymore, nor are current forms of green power. We need something more like a miracle to fuel the economies into 2030 and beyond.
..don't panic
it might be great to have a pair of these per cabinet (1+1 failover).
damaged by dogma
Of course, this Enermax PSU won't fit into any of these devices. I can't even imagine how you could build a desktop system that would ever need much more than 1/2 that PSU's possible output. Quad CPU boards are a little difficult to come by, and they won't run off completely standard PSUs anyway (although the label on the PSU says it's EPS 12V, so it might have the 24 pin power + 8 pin processor power connectors). However, this isn't really the market for whitebox manufacturers, and what meager money you might save would most likely be outweighed by the next-day shipping of replacement parts that name brand vendors can offer you.
Besides, I don't even want to contemplate needing a dedicated 15A breaker just for my system. My little 350W PSU is working just fine for me.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Just give me a older machine with better fabed pieces. I had a two x86 boxes cpu's die a ibook 14 incher with a failing MOBO, god damn my old "crappy" slightly OC'd celeron from E-Machine is still working.
New life for my DEC PDP 10! w00t!
With my line printer, I can print out each individual frame from The Matrix in ASCII art, staple them all together and flip through the sequence to show those smart-ass HP Calc video hackers what retro is all about!
[loud, evil cackling]
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
everyone knows that a 250 watt compusa generic brand works for just as good
Please sir, never build a computer yourself.
The sad truth is that the quality of power supplies IS dependant on how much money you spend. First of all, 250w is simply not enough to power a demanding computer. When the processor alone draws up to 130w (Pentium 4) and each of the two videocards draws 80w (GeForce 7800 GTX), just the CPU and videocards alone are already drawing 290w at peak. Don't forget the motherboard, hard drives, sound card, and all other peripherals and cards.
So, now that we've established that 250w isn't enough, even if it WAS enough, why wouldn't a generic PSU work? Well, because the cheaper you go, the shiftier the manufacturers get with their wattage claims. Yes, that generic power supply can hit 250w. At room temperature. However, with the heat inside a PSU usually closer to 40c to 50c, the cheap PSU can only provide a fraction of their rating. Not to mention that the power from the generic PSU isn't going to be nearly as clean, or nearly as close to the desired voltages on the rails. And cheapo PSUs are unreliable too; they have a way higher failure rate than higher quality PSUs. I blew out 4 cheap PSUs in a 2 year period due to my houses's less than optimal power quality before I finally got a good quality Antec. It has lasted another 2 years without issue.
The general rule of thumb for the quality of a power supply is the weight. The heavier the power supply, generally, the higher quality. Compare a 300w generic power supply to a 300w "premium" power supply, and the better quality one weighs about twice as much. There is a reason for this, better internal cooling and a heck of a lot more internal components.
with 256K of static RAM, a 32K Tarbel BASIC (staying away from Microsoft), and a decent LSI11 CPU.
Perhaps it is overkill. Nobody needs that much RAM.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
"No computer will ever need more than 64watts of power."
DUM DEE DUM
In other news, the new GeForce 8800 GTX Ultra XE Platinum Gamer's Choice Extra Soupy Overclocked Edition has been announced. For a low low price of $9,900, your computer can run up to a zillion* PETAFLOPS** of graphics power! *[Maybe] **[Not really] MINIMUM REQUIREMENT: Two or five PSUs 1 Kilowatt or higher Eleventeen Molex connectors Two PCI-Express ports (cooling fan may extend over up to four neighboring ports)
when this amount of power is being consumed, shouldn't we be thinking about... energy efficiency instead?
Energy efficiency? What the heck is that?!? Some kind of commie pinko thing?
Pardon me, I've got to go hop in my SUV so I can drive a quarter-mile to the supermarket so I can pick up a newspaper. I wanna know more about Courtney Love's pregnancy. Oh, and I suppose I should care about what's going on in Iraq...
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
Personally, I'd rather have my four RAIDs split among two or four boxen than a single box. It'd be a crying shame if you spent all that money on four RAID controllers and sixteen hard disks, and then had the whole thing fall apart when your single testosterone-addict power supply takes a dump.
I am sure if you want to buy one enermax won't say, nah you're goofy for spending money on this everyone knows that a 250 watt compusa generic brand works for just as good.
Sorry to say it but buying (and trusting) a generic-branded power supply is more dumb or "goofy" than getting an Enermax PSU regardless of the wattage it provides.
The PSU being the most important part in a pc has to be made by a company renown for reliable PSU's if you want the juice to flow forever and ever. Otherwise, you're playing with fire and in some cases, real fire.
Yeah right.
I fail to see how this PSU is going to stop me tripping over the end of my penis.
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In other news, the new GeForce 8800 GTX Ultra XE Platinum Gamer's Choice Extra Soupy Overclocked Edition has been announced. For a low low price of $9,900, your computer can run with up to a zillion* PETAFLOPS** of graphics power!
*[Maybe]
**[Not really]
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:
Two or five PSUs 1 Kilowatt or higher
Eleventeen Molex connectors
Two PCI-Express ports (cooling fan may extend over up to four neighboring ports)
I for one welcome our new PSU Overlords.
This seems to be exactly what Orion Multisystems needs for their 96-node "Galaxy" platform. It makes me wonder if this was originally built for the 96-node (which needs 2 - 3 beefy power supplies in parallel as-is to power all EIGHT 12-node boards in a single chassis).
1400kW/120volts = 11.67amps. Considering that most plugs in your house are on 15amp breakers, you're not going to be able to use much more on that circuit.
My AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer is plugged into a wattmeter which shows that it is using 94 Watts at the moment. When it is doing something more demanding it briefly jumps up to about 167 Watts. The operating system is the AMD 64 version of Ubuntu Linux which, by default, has the AMD 64 "Cool 'n Quit" feature enabled. When the CPU is doing something more demanding it runs at the full 2.4 GHz but, when it is doing ordinary easy stuff it slows down to 1 GHz.
I am not a gamer and have not tried running any demanding games and do not an expensive power hungry video card. With a more expensive video card it would use more power but, it does have 1 GB of ram, an 802.11g WiFi card, and two large 7200 RPM hard drives. The monitor, water pump and speakers are not plugged into the wattmeter but they aren't run from my computer's 350 watt power supply anyway.
I built this computer to be as quiet as possible and use a Zalman Reserator Fanless Water cooling system to cool the CPU. The video card and the 350 W power supply are both fanless models. It has a rheostat, with a knob, that I use to turn down the speed of the two case fans to a quiet noise level. The computer is very quiet and efficient and, thank goodness, does not need a 1,000 Watt power supply.
The viper isn't even that fast anymore, for 20k less, I can go buy a 07 Vette z06 (with loads more horsepower) and completely smoke a viper!
There is no target audience for this product. This product is a pure marketing tool, so the company can be the first to market with a 1000 watt power supply. The very existence of this /. article proves it works. Yesterday I'd never heard of Enermax, now I'm discussing their power supplies.
Only if you plug in an ATM Machine and type in your PIN number.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=300W+*+%2 4.08%2F(1+kW*h)*24h*30&btnG=Search but according to google calculator, I'm probably paying almost $20 a month for my computer (ok probably less since I don't think i'm using the full 300W and I don't have the thing on all day, but I've done so in the past. Anyway, that's out of a total bill of $150 which includes AC, refrigerator, water heater, etc. So that 10% figure might not be so farfetched.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And for 20k less I'll build a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 9 that will smoke your corvette.
What's your point?
I met a guy on one of those a few weeks ago. He was 6'8'' and thick. He was very happy to have it. To top it off, his had a nitro kit.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
not as much as you might think.
HDD Power consumption
IDE/SATA drives only draw about 7-13W Idle/read&write, 15K SCSI drives a bit over 20W read&write.
Spin up might be a problem, but I'd assume you'd want to use cards that supported staggered sinpup on a setup that large.
So, yes 16 HDDs can pull quite a bit of power, about 300W for top end SCSI solutions. Though you wouldn't be thought of as particularly bright if you entrust a setup like that to a basic quality desktop PSU. And the quality of supplies you'd be using with a high end storage array like that (ie something in the N+1 redundant Zippy line) have been availible at well over 1000W for a while.
I think a 1000W PSU in a standard EAXT setup is massive overkill. I really have a hard time thinking of a workstation / stand alone server setup that would be too much for quality 500-600W PSUs to handle right now.
Anandtech reviewed a 4 CPU dual core Opteron setup from SUN while back, it only drew about 600W.
Railgun.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
If you feel the need to qualify something as 'not-penis-related', then it's probably penis related. :-)
-- sigs cause cancer.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedg e/en/2800_specs.pdf
We just got one of these at work. Dual '930W' power supplies...
You were kidding with that server comment, right? Right?
As others have said already, if you need anywhere near that much power in a server, you should be looking at redundant power supplies. I'm putting together some boxes right now with sixteen 400GB SATA drives, a hot-swap backplane, and a 650W redundant power supply. The power supply is basically three 350W supplies that slot into a housing that ties them all together. It can deliver full rated power with just two of the supplies running, but it can do the same with three supplies without having to run them balls-out. That's what you want in a server, not some shiny overcompensation for certain inadequacies.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Just because a device is rated for a load does not mean it will use that load. Because you have a 200A pannel does that mean that you use 200A all the time? No, you doen't even come close unless your elecric range, water heater, hot tub, and resistive heat are all going at the same time. The real reason to have a 1000W power supply is to get clean and stable power if you use 200W. For our purposes a power supply has a part (rectifier) that chops off the negative voltage leaving you with a bunch of pulses of voltage. There is a second component (capacitor) that stores energy at the peaks and delivers it during the valleys. There is a third component (added to the rectifier makes it a bridge rectifier) that will turn the negitive voltage into positive voltage that fits nicely in the spaces inbetween the existing positive pulses. This doubles you efficiency by giving you twice the power at the output from the same input. Everything is great untill you put a load on the power supply, then you start to actually use the power out of the capacitor, this leads to a dip in the voltage called ripple. The higher the max wattage for a power supply the more power you can use before the ripple becomes a problem. Ripple in a processor is bad, this is why you will notice capacitors all over your motherboard and on some chip packages. These capacitors help smooth out the ripple.
If you run a 200W load on a 250W power supply then you will have a great deal of ripple. If you run a 200W load on a 1kW power supply then you will have much less ripple. ripple == fluctuating voltage == unstable pc
Apparently you haven't ran into intel's higher end gaming chips. They cook more than my amds anyday.
All my amds run cooler than my intel chips, but then again, I believe in using adaquate cooling.
You might want to give that a try.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
...about my 600Watt Enermax :o(
I have a Pentium D 8200, 2 GB of DDR2, Dual HDs (one SATA one IDE) and dual DVD burners, and a Radeon X800. Also, add a couple of firewire and USB devices. All of this runs off of a good 350W power supply with room to spare. If a 6800 (which uses more power than the 7800) uses about 135W, SLI would use 270W. That means you really only need a 500W supply. I think the idea above is right. By having an obsenely overkill flagship model, you not only make a couple of bucks off rich, poorly endowed kids who want a 1000W supply, but you get to brag that your company makes the most powerful power supply comercially available.
I hope this thing has active PFC to limit inrush current when the thing is initially plugged in and switched on. Otherwise, the inrush with simple thermistor limiters can be about double that much... in this case, it would definitely need its own circuit or at least have to be the first thing switched on. (I can start the AC while the PC is on but doing the opposite often trips.)
In real life, 15A breakers trip somewhere between 17A and 20A. Also, it usually take more than a half-cycle overload to trip them. This is just enough to let me use both the toaster and microwave oven at the same time... if I start the toasts first or during the microwave's magnetron deadtime.
15a120v [std outlet] = 1800w Place another computer on the same outlet (or, any other outlet directly connected to the same line) and it's lights out for you buddy.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
Does anyone care anymore? I only point out the mistakes so I can linkify them for Anti-Slash.
You would think if some company is going to buy a Slashvertisement, they would at least check their grammar first.
HJ
i think you meant that ugly ass Dodge magnum
My AMD Athlon 64 3800+ is plugged into a wattmeter and at the moment is shows that it is using 94 Watts. Under heavy usage the Wattmeter shows about 167 Watts. I am not a gamer and do not have a power hungry high performace video card so the power consumption my be lower than otherwise. But, I do have 1 GB of RAM, two huge 7200 RPM hard drives and an 802.11g WiFi card. My fanless 350 Watt power supply is plenty. The monitor, water pump and other exteral devices are not plugged into the Wattmeter.
Computer power supplies are actually several different power supplies in one with different wattage ratings on each leg. If I remember correctly, an ATX motherboard usually has one or two +12 Volt legs, a +5 volt leg, a +3.3 volt leg, and possibly another leg of some other voltage which I can't recall at the mement. Im not an expert on this but, my understanding is that on most power supplies, the maximum rated Wattage is not available on just any possible leg. Different components are plugged into each leg and ideally someone should calculate how much is needed on each leg and compare that to the power supply specs for each leg. Since most people do not bother calculating power usage on each leg and comparing it to power supply specs, I am guessing that the computer store salesmen just grab one of their most powerful power supplies and say "this should do the job." I suppose it does not really matter if it is far more than necessary.
I use the AMD-64 version of Ubuntu Linux. By default, the AMD Athlon 64 "Cool 'N Quiet" is enabled. Using that feature, it slows the CPU from its normal 2.4 GHz down to 1 GHz when when idle or doing ordinary easy tasks. At that time the Wattmeter shows 94 Watts, when doing a more demanding task it jumps to 2.4 GHz and uses 167 Watts. Would someone with a wattmeter and a more power hungry computer please tell me what they have and are doing that uses 400 or 500 W or more.
I built my computer to be as quiet as possible and use a Zalman Reserator 1 fanless water cooling for the CPU. I also have a fanless video card. I also adjust the knob on a rheostat to slow the two case fans down to where they are quiet.
Why you gotta be down on the man for a big PSU. 1400W, let's see...
30 Watts for a Socket A motherboard with a Geode CPU.
20 Watts each for 60 500GB Hitachi SATA drives connected to 5 PCI based 12 port SATA cards.
Sounds like pretty f'ing energy efficient storage to me.
C'mon. How many people here have any real need for that kind of power in a PSU? 3? 5? maybe 10 at the most? Nah, I think my penis is of sufficient size as to where I don't need a 1000 watt PSU just for bragging rights. With what I have, I do just fine with 450W. I'm only powering an efficient AMD Athlon 64 and not some power hog Pentium 4 crap. Besides, I don't need a sky high electrical bill. I'm already getting reamed at the gas pimp^H^H^H^Hpump instead.
Thats all good... until you find a corner and try to turn. That thing must have the turning radius of a 18 wheel semi...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Growing old is manditory. Growing up is Optional.
Now leave me alone, I'm cooking Lunch in my USB microwave.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
MOD PARENT UP!
mod down for usage of boxen
18-13 miles to the gallon on a fucking motorcycle?! holy shit!
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Power supplies are terribly inefficient. 66% efficiency is typical, this one gets 71% efficiency which is considered "good".
Of course that doesn't mean it's wasting 400 watts just sitting idle. That only means that when the system is drawing the full capacity of 1000 watts you're losing 400 watts to inefficient AC->DC power conversion.
AccountKiller
When you're Strategic Air Command and you're defending against the commies, you need three megawatts to power your computers :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You use the 1kw to power a lot of fans.
You will have to, you see.
You know, sinpup isn't too bad of a handle :)
Well, strap 2 overclocked 64bit 2x Core CPU's to the motherboard, along with a set of 2 SLI GPUs, throw in there 4 IDE hard drives, maybe another 4 SCSI ones, 8 Gigs of memory, some multimedia USB powered devices, bunch of other PCI cards, 4 large fans, and you could be looking at around 1kW peak to keep the system stable. You'd have to run the AC in the Winter, to stay cool and you could bake potatoes in the case, but you would have a nice stolid system...
While a power supply with a higher rating may have a cleaner output than a one with a lower rating, this is not necessarily the case. Without other measurements there simply isn't enough information to say.
Computer power supplies use a switching circuit to generate the output voltages. Not the simply, rectifier and filter system you described. They do use a recifier and filter, but this is only at the initial stage and ripple at that point doesn't significantly affect the output.
In a rectifier and filter supply, using a full wave rectifier does not double efficiency. It does allow you to get by with less filtering and a reduced peak input current.
Creating a full wave bridge rectifier doesn't involve adding 1 component to a half wave rectifier. In fact, you need 3 more components. A half wave rectifier is just a single diode. A full wave rectifier consists of 4 diodes.
Switching supplies do have ripple, and it is effected by the load on the supply. Some of the other factors affecting the amount of ripple are switching frequency, inductance of the switched coil, capacitance and resistance of the output capacitor, and input voltage.
Capacitors placed near ICs on the motherboard are for filtering out high frequency noise than can be induced on the circuit board traces. These capacitors are not normally the right values for filtering out 60 or 120 hz noise from a rectifier. If it weren't for induced noise on the traces, you could simply place one capacitor at (or in, as there already is) the power supply instead of one at each IC.
Your computer should run perfectly stable on any supply up to its rated output power and current. If a supply outputs so much noise that your computer is unstable before you reach the rated output, then it is almost certainly faulty or rated in such a way as to scam consumers.
With the same load, a higher rated supply might run cooler or with a cleaner output; but it depends on many different factors. You need to know things like output noise and efficiency. Output power alone is not enough information.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
A good number of people here seem convinced that a 1000 watt psu consumes 1000 watts under normal operation... whatever load it has attached to it!
So let's get this straight, if you replace your current power supply with this one you won't be consuming any more power than you currently are.
Sorry for all the other folks who know this, but I had to say that for the benefit of those who seem so (wrongly) concerned about the power efficiency of this device.
- "They misunderestimated me."
That's something we don't often hear about when people talk about computer PSUs, but here we do get a lot of them.
I keep hearing people recommending those nice and expensive power supplies - just as I have been using for a few years, but when it comes to an area with a lot of brownouts... It doesn't matter what one buys anymore - they all fail miserably when it hits. Everytime it happens we loose a few at work. Every ~6 months I get to replace one at home no matter what brand it was. I'm getting the same lifespan off the cheap ones. UPS'es aren't really helping either (not the cheap "standby" kind at least).
Power outages never seem to cause much problems, but brownouts... I hate 'em.
Also, everytime it happens, I have to unplug all the cables on my KVM switch at work or none of the PCs plugged on it will boot (I only get a blinking power light).
///<sig
I was going to respond to the parent, but I'll respond to you instead.
Brownouts are killers. Because switching power supplies have an effective negative impedance, brownouts cause them to draw more current than normal and die.
We had a serious brownout here at my place a year ago (down to about 50V, I measured). My fluorescent lights kept working apparently normally, so it took some time for me to figure out what was going on. I thought I had lost just one leg of my power. But once I noticed it was a brownout, I flipped the main breaker at my place.
But it was too late, the power supply on one of my ethernet switches killed itself in the classic fashion. But at least I saved myself more trouble.
Anyway, back to the parent poster, I'd rather the brownouts did trigger breakers and cause blackouts, cause as you point out, they cause a lot less damage. Honestly, I'd think the power company would feel the same way. Stuff that breaks under brownouts will tend to be more expensive than the stuff hurt in a regular voltage surge.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's just some bullshit naysayer "controversy" added to fluff up the submission, nothing more.
Consider a possibility that they considered.
With Nforce pro you could theoreticly put 4 gfx cards on a system.
Putting a dual core opteron pair with those 4 gfx cards. Then there is raid issue, with 8 15k rpm scsi raids with controller. Soundcard, and 32GB of ram, and chipset takes power too.
Now put 500W for GFX, 200W for CPU:s , 100W for raid array, and 100W for rest of stuff, then there is need for some margin if the system heats because then the efficiency goes down and power comsumption goes up, and power supply delivers less when its heated.
Yes, its a system for those with huge fortunes. But the powersupply isn't el cheapo anyway.
Or they could have projected the future power comsumption based on prescott going dual core, and gfx cards previous increases in powerconsumption.
The trend has been obvious, we need more power. Of course you don't know when they made a get go for designing of this powersupply perhaps they decided the project based on last two years increase in power requirements, and predicted based on that for another two years increase or something similar.
Or they just wanted to bragging rights, and recoup the costs of designing the powersupply by selling its lesspowerfull brethren. Which is better have engineers design something that gets public attention or put a marketing campaing.
The fact is the powersupply got attention of thousands of nerds who buy computers for that company, and maybe some of them starts paying more attention to that company when buying next powersupply, even if they don't buy 1KW model.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Enermax who? I've also haven't heard of them, yet they have an uber 1337 1kW PSU for the masses? I think I would want to know if their PSU are built with quality first before I make the plunge to buy one. It would help if the company is reputable as well.
The problem with these types of setups are that when you finally do lose a single power supply, and the other two step up to fill in the gap, you will often lose one or two of those as well.
If you had more than three supplies (say 6 or 7) then the increase when one dies is negligible. In the 2+1 configuration you talked about, you'll be looking at a 50% load increase when one of the three die.
For example, you have a server that requires 1000w of power, and have three 500w power supplies. Most of the time, each is only providing 333w, but if one dies, the remaining two shoot up to 500w a pieice.
The problem is that one of the other two might have been doing fine at 333w, but struggle with 500w. After working hard for a few minutes and heating up, it too will die. This leaves you with a server that is just as dead as one with a non-redundant power supply. Actually, maybe slightly more dead, as you will have to get more than one PS to get back into production.
The two options are to either provide many more smaller power supplies, or go to 2 power supplies that are each capable of taking the entire load of the machine, and running the box single legged on one PS until it fails over to the redundant supply.
Since things like power supplies tend to get more efficient as they grow larger, having two of these large supplies is better in the long run than more of the smaller supplies.
Mission critical servers I work with have two power supplies that are each hooked to separate redundant circuits (220v or 440v AC). If one of the PSes take a dump, the other picks up the load. Admins receive an alarm and swap out the failed PS, leaving the server in production with no outage.
You would need 1kw if you were running 20 or so hard drives. When you turn on the computer they all spin up, each drawing a few amps, and if there isn't enough power they *all* fail, and your system doesn't boot. I know a guy who does the MythTV thing and he just buys more and more hard drives, and bigger and bigger power supplies to power them.
You forget to mention that apart from this basic "rectification" part of the power supply, there is also the switchmode converter that actually has a feedback loop to control the converter depending on the output loading.
So while you will see more ripple on the capacitor when the load increases, the regulation loop will compensate for that and you still get a stable output on your +5 that does not depend on the ripple.
Of course the output of the converter is again rectified (but not full-wave), but this converter is running at a high frequency so ripple is not the real design limit here. If it were, you could improve the supply by increasing the capacitor values rather than the power rating.
My newly-built pc will draw an absolute maximum of 82 watts (regrettably, 20 of those are just from the lossage in the PSU itself).
I have (had) friends who didn't at all mind jet-turbine noise levels from their pc, which by the way was sitting right next to their bed.
I shall conclude that people are different, and no doubt they will be able to sell these Galaxies. maybe not to people who *need* them, but at least to people who *want* them.
"Good news, everyone!"
How else am I supposed to power my 60 C degree P4?
with some of these 400+ watt 3d cards now on the market, it is probaly only a matter of time before
you need one of these puppies to run Quake VI at
a decent framerate with only some features turned off.
Power supplies are measured by the OUTPUT, not the input. A power supply, rated at 250w should provide 250w output, no matter what it's effeciency. Look at the sticker on the side of the unit sometime... The outputs all add up to the rated wattage, and the input (for a 300W PS) is generally 115/230v @8/5A which is more than 900W for input.
Well, to be fair, it does for absolutely everyone who isn't using a Pentium 4. My hottest 2GHz+ system is only using 100W when maxed-out, the rest are even lower.
I would very much like to know how you "established" that. Even if you're right, it's almost certainly a defective unit, not a case of your system exceeding the rated capacity.
That is clearly a case of defective products. Either the motherboard is on it's last leg, or those dirt-cheap power supplies you are getting are utter crap.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Fortunately here in Europe we have 230V mains.
Typical hourse circuits are 16A. We have 3 or more of those in a house. Hungry appliances like an AC would be on a separate breaker.
You rarely trip a breaker because of overload here.
I beg to differ: The energy efficiency of these things is best when they're nearly maxed out. So installing a 1KW PSU while needing only, say, 350W, in fact IS wasting valuable resources. In that specific case, go and get a 400W model (just to be on the safe side of things) and you'll get a whole lot more bang for your bucks...
Nobody seems to see the point. ...
...
CPUs are hitting a GHz barrier.
The only way to go faster is to cool things down.
And now you have the power supply to do it, whichever your solution : thermodynamic fridge, sterling cycle, peltier devices, water amonium or oil
Consider this :
dual CPUs + dual graphic cards = 4 waterblocks
say, 150W peltier for each CPU and 70W peltier for each graphic card = 440W
Now add the power required for the system itself,
don't forget the water pump, and I am not even considering watercooling the chipset yet.
We can even start discussing the appropriateness of 150W peltiers for dualcore Opterons.
Watercooling isn't only for single CPU systems
Let's face it - penis waving competitions will never go out of style.
Personally, I'm going to use this to build a slient PC. You see, I'll have an entire wall of fans, and then just put my PC in front of it. The PC will then be silent and very cool. Did I mention that this will also effectively increase the size of my penis?
Whether or not my apartment can stand the pressure increase that a 1KW wall array of fans will produce is another issue all together. I'm not worried though... this is FOR SCIENCE!
My other car is first.
This PSU will have the 24pin+8pin motherboard connectors if its EPS12V, and you need them for dual cpu motherboards. (my Tyan manual says "do not even thing about bringing that ATX2 PSU near this motherboard or your warranty is void, oh yes, we won't even consider a replacement". I think they mean it).
:)
Bear in mind that there are 2 things you want in a server PSU:
1. Enough output to power everything at startup, when you're drawing more power than you normally do when everything's running along. Hard drives really spike at startup, buit once spinning it takes relatively little to keep them going.
2. Efficiency. All PSUs provide different efficiencies as the load on them increases. eg, you may be 75% efficient at 50% load, but at 100% load you'll be only 50% efficient. All switched power supplies only deliver what you're using anyway, so if I have a gazillion-watt PSU, but only drew 1 watt from it, it'd be sucking 1watt out of the wall socket and not dimming the lights
3. Reliability. Damn, I'll come in again.
Sounds like something you'd see when the pub closes.
Look at the sticker on the side of the unit sometime..
I have, many times. Many just list a wattage, most of mine list Max wattage and peek output. For example this crappy supply that came with my full tower is listed as 300watt but clearly marked peek output total 165watt. To me that says 55% efficent. Utter crap but never the less any time I actually see it clearly marked max output the value is lower than the wattage rating by there and abouts of 70%, in rare cases less, in even more rare cases more.
When it's not clearly printed on the label if the wattage listed is input or output, I assume input. If i'm wrong i'm wrong, but it's been my experence that's the standard.
Well, to be fair, it does for absolutely everyone who isn't using a Pentium 4. My hottest 2GHz+ system is only using 100W when maxed-out, the rest are even lower.
I was almost happy with the cheepo compusa PS, it worked MOST of the time. I would crash once a day though. But I swapped it out with something new and i'm stable as a rock. Works just great on my other machine that's an AMD 1700 with only one HD.
That is clearly a case of defective products. Either the motherboard is on it's last leg, or
those dirt-cheap power supplies you are getting are utter crap.
Well the motherboard was pretty damned new, and it's still in service under a different power supply. The PS was what came with the full tower... so I would agree the PS was utter crap. In fact there is no shortage of utter crap powersupplies on the market.
I would very much like to know how you "established" that. Even if you're right, it's almost certainly a defective unit, not a case of your system exceeding the rated capacity.
Basic trouble shooting. Had odd ball problems a while after swapping out that 400watt unit that the Biostar motherboard rejected. Matter of fact, I have a stack of power supplies here many are pulls from HP systems (Vectra VE series)... I would crash under the following conditions....
1. After the system had been on for a while... I would put in a CD and crash
2. I would play a game... after about 1/2 hour crash
3. Microsoft word.. 15min or so after using it.
I however would not crash under the following condtions
1. disconnecting all my HDs except for one
2. Using the crap power supplies but powering my drives with an old at power supply, but the motherboard with an ATX power supply rated anywhere from 150watts (e machine pull) to 400 watts.
3. Swapping out the power supply with a new one, one I guessed was not utter crap
The most stable supplies i have with the exception of this new one are pulls from HP vectras by Delta Electronics.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Minor nitpick - most SCSI controllers spin up each drive in turn to mitigate the power spike issue. This is part of the reason why SCSI drivers tend to wait a while before enumerating the devices in the chain. My old SCSI card would take about 10 seconds to spin up every device if the chain was full - slightly irritating since I rarely used it with one device, but nothing a custom kernel couldn't fix.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Scientific computing? Those of us who use our GPUs for something other than graphics are often quite happy to get a decent CPU or 4 to run everything that can't be offloaded to the GPU. Still, probably not a huge market segment.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Zalman Reserator fanless water cooling system is somewhat expensive but I wanted a quiet computer even if it cost a little more. For me it was worth it especially since the computer sits next to my bed not far from my TV. It is almost totally silent. If I turn the two case fans down as low as they go and lean over closer I can just barely hear a faint noise from the water pump or the flow indicator. It sounds like an aquarium pump.
When I reboot and looked in the BIOS just now it said that my CPU was 40 degress C. That was just after light usage of the computer. I have read that there are more powerful cooling systems which are for serious overclockers but, this is the most quiet water cooling system available.
I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NS-939 motherboard which uses the socket 939 version of the AMD Athlon 64. The Zalman website said it would work with a socket 939 processor but the instruction manual that came with my kit did not mention being able to use the 939. Perhaps I had a slightly older version of the instruction manual with a slightly older kit. At first it did not seem as if the kit was going to fit onto my CPU, but then, I realized that I had to remove a plastic base like thing from the back of the motherboard before it would fit. It then fit and worked perfectly.
Fortuanately, buy default, the BIOS was not set to complain about zero RPMs from the CPU fan. On some motherboards the fan failure protection feature would need to be turned off. I placed the 23 inch tall reserator behind the computer desk where it is out of site. There is reasonable air flow where I placed it. I plugged the water pump into the UPS because I did not want to have the computer running while the water pump was off during a power failure.
I have several versions of Linux and two versions of Windows on the computer. When idle Windows 2000 uses 130 W and Windows XP uses 109 W. The 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux uses 94 W. I also have Slackware which is 32-bit OS and comes with a 2.4 kernel. Slackware used about 127 W until I later installed a 2.6.12.4 kernel and recompiled it to enable the appropriate features. I then made another change or two to enable the AMD "Cool 'n Quiet" feature and brought its power consumption down to 94 W.
I only have a total of 3 fans on the computer. There are the two case fans which I slow down with an adjustable rheostat. There is also a northbridge fan does not make any significant noise. You asked if it was worth it, well for me it was anyway.
Use this to calculate the power requirements of your setup.
This is purely speculative but I would imagine someone interested in such a psu would be those interested in nonstandard cooling methods. Peltiers can draw nearly a 100 watts each (tho on avg id say they are closer to 50), maybe throw in some extra peltiers for video cards and chipsets, it might make sense to buy this thing. Or maybe even a compressor based solution, im sure thatll eat those watts right up.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Thick? He had have to be pretty fucking thick to buy a piece of crap like that.
Never heard of them? wow..
They make nice PSUs... most of the ones I've used in the past have been enermax, since they're the only reliable PSUs you can buy off the shell around here (the other brands being coolermaster, that have a shitty reputation, and a collection of noname chinese ones).
It doesn't necessarily always *DRAW* a kW. This is like the difference between a 3/8 inch diameter garden hose and a 5/8 inch. You can draw more water from the 5/8 in hose, but you don't have to. If a 350W and a 1kW supply are both feeding, say, a 250W load (typical for a desktop), they will both be drawing slightly over 250W from the mains - load power plus losses in the supply. Since both are likely 85-90% efficient, that means that in both cases mains draw will be between 280 and 295W. Why anyone would need this supply is a different question, but i'm sure someone, somewhere will manage to eat up it's max output!
No. The Dodge Magnum isn't a penis enhancer, it's a penis eliminator. Basically, you can assume that any guy driving a Dodge Magnum not only lacks enough of a penis for it to be even remotely useful, but is also so out of touch with what he has that it may as well just be removed and spare him the confusion.
Normally speaking that would amount to down time, not so much the destruction of the data. So for my MP3/XViD collection, a single power supply would suffice.
I only buy Antec PSUs.
You get closer to 25 out of a flat head Ford-based V8 motorcyce...
By "nitro" do you mean he was running nitromethane? That seems rather impractical on the street. Perhaps you meant nitrous oxide, which would be called a "nitrous" kit, or possibly a "NO2" kit (maybe even "nos" if you're a dumbass who watched fast 'n furious too many times - but you don't sound like that kind of dumbass, since you didn't mention your 10 second 1/4 mile street-driven Honda).
Nothing unfortunate about needing 200-240v power. Countries with properly designed electricity distribution use this voltage by default :-)
(Just kidding, but when I lived in the US, I found 120v just too weedy. You can't run a good electric kettle off it, you need a separate 220v feed for a dryer or electric oven, and the supply at the sockets could deliver less than half the power than the sockets back home).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
nothing new... 30 or so years ago good PDP11 used two similar (in terms of output power) units for a total of 2kW (some setups probably needed even more) http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/psu.html
not to mention systems built of vacuum lamps from the ENIAC era - they needed their own power stations...
You're forgetting the vast array of lights, excess fans, water pumps, displays for everything, Genital Drive, etc. That stupid mod crap sucks some power, too...
will it open Adobe Acrobat any faster?
the significance of a signature is insignificant
That bike is insane. An 8.2 litre engine? On a bike? That is madness. 502hp...to move 1300lbs. $40,000...why why why. I guess I admire the audacity of an engine that big on a motorcycle, someone had to do it. Still, a hayabusa can do 190mph, costs $11k and has a 1 liter engine. Power to weight and all that.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
... is the point flying over your head.
actually the hayabusa can do 240 off the showroom floor and iirc was only sold in '99 in the States
I have actually needed a 480W power supply before. It was redundant, for a server, and built by Elan Vital (same people as Enermax if I'm not mistaken).
They actually make quite efficient power supplies, if you bother to read the PFC specs.
This really seems over-powered for a Play-Station Unit.
When I said 'crying shame', I didn't necessarily mean hosed data, although a lot can happen when everything comes crashing to a halt in the middle of a write - we've lost an entire 1.5TB RAID that way at work. It's mostly just that in most situations I've experienced where you're likely to see four RAID arrays in one place, downtime is a pretty big deal.
And if you have enough money to collect an MP3/XViD collection large enough to require that much storage, methinks you'd probably be the type to throw it on some real hardware, not some huge mess of disks duct taped into an old Dell case and powered by wannabe electrical relay station. That, or you have some explaining to do to the four-letter acronym people.
i have a Antec 480 and it sucks, 3.3v rail is always around 3.1 and sometimes it sinks to 3.0v and then shuts down. I also had a Enermax and was not too great either. When comes to PSU brand defenitely does not mean quality
the only problem with that is that a flux capacitor requires 1.21 giga watts, not kilowatts.... so no time traveling bike for you!
I'd like to point out that there are three common rectifier configurations consisting of:
half wave - 1 diode
full wave - 2 diodes (and a center tapped secondary winding)
bridge - 4 diodes
The part you selected was a imaginary sarcastic response from a higher quality PSU supplier.
Power supplies use switching technology, so the actual power drawn from the wall in in proportion to the power needed in the system. Most switching power supplies have an efficiency of around 85 percent,and that will vary about 5 percent up or down based on load. PFC suplies are a little less efficient since there is some additional internal power needed to power the PFC circuit. The difference is about 5 percent.
One application for this supply may be to power the hard drives of a SCSI raid system which can have up to 32 drives in parallel. (Note that SCSI drives can be controlled to start up under processor control so all do not start at once.)
One problem with high power supplies is that the connector to the mother board can only carry a limited power before it overheats at the connector pins and frys the MB and cable connector.
I expect the need for 1000 watts is mostly to insure that there is power to spare for a reliable system. If you run a component at half or less of its rated power the reliability figures (can) go up dramatically, and many companies demand high reliability.
The cost of components for 1000 watts vs 500 watts is minimal since both must use the circuit topology is the same for either power, and the number of components is about the same either way. Main difference is the size of fans and heatsinks in the PS along with the magnetics.
This is admittedly a gross over simplification aimed at somebody who doesn't know that much about circut design. Computer power supplies are of a much more complicated switching design, but the point here is to give the layman some rough idea why you would want to get a power supply that was rated far above your expected load.
Being employed by a company that manufactures power supplies, here is my $0.02... 1.) The PSU will only deliver as much current as commanded by the computer. If you have 300W of loading, 300W will be drawn from it. With most PC PSUs operating in the area of 70-75% efficiency (which is awful) you'd expect to be pulling 400W from the mains. 2.) The key advantage to using a 1kW PSW in a system that only draws 300W is component stress. It is a known fact that the life of an electronic component in use is inversely proportional to the amount of stress it sees. Using a switching MOSFET at 100% of its rating will drastically shorten its useful life compared with using the same component at 50% of its rating. This is especially critical for electrolytic capacitors. Unless the design is buggered (i.e. crap efficiency unless operated at >50% maximum load) it would certainly last longer and be more reliable than a lower-capability supply delivering the same amount of power. NAVMAT guidelines (US Navy power supply reliablilty guidelines) dictate compoment deratings anywhere from 70-50% of maximum. You can bet that cheap, generic supplies do NOT meet any derating guidelines - this is why they tend to blow up often. By using the PSU at less than its rated power, you are essentially creating some margin as far as component derating goes. 3.) The primary of a high-power supply will be tougher (as it has to deliver more power) and therefore will be more easily able to deal with line conditions (brown-outs, drop-outs, surges, etc.) I'd have no issues using this 1kW supply in a conventional, single-CPU system knowing that I'm likely only using the PSU to 40-50% of its capacity.
This is obviously aimed at the American market where bigger is always better. *sigh* I can just hear the dumbasses bragging about how big their PS are. This would go great with their 12 passenger SUVs.
Another excuse to build a nuclear reactor in my garage! As if my impending gas heating bill this winter won't be enough (I expect Jan-Feb to run me around $300 each.) Anyone know where I can find a bunch of those old glow-in-the-dark alarm clocks?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
(Just kidding, but when I lived in the US, I found 120v just too weedy. You can't run a good electric kettle off it, you need a separate 220v feed for a dryer or electric oven, and the supply at the sockets could deliver less than half the power than the sockets back home).
Of course there is something to be said for the fact that 120V is a bit safer then 240V if you happen to screw up somewhere. It has also been my experience from traveling in Europe that our electric is a bit more reliable then yours (though voltage doesn't have much to do with that) -- not to mention cheaper. Thanks to our split-phase setup we have the choice between 120V and 208/240V depending on application. Our light bulbs also last longer then yours ;)
Besides -- what kind of electric kettle are you running? I have a little device called a "hotshot" that will boil a coffee cup sized amount of water in about 30 seconds. That's starting out with cold water from the tap. I use it to heat water for tea. That's not fast enough for you?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Now that we can make multi-GHz CPUs which take hundreds of watts to power and need massive noisy fans, couldn't we backport the tech and get a sub-GHz CPU that needs practically no power or cooling?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
...their math skills are horrible. Turns out the PSU actually has 1,092.1 watts of power. The "combined" section on the label doesn't equal 66 - it equals 68. My 550 watt PSU is 23% more efficient and if it were the same wattage as mine, would still be 10-11% more efficient than this Enermax-branded paper weight I see before me. It's like driving a suped-up Honda Civic... 400 horsepower, 2 inch-pounds of torque. So what's the incentive of upgrading (more like downgrading) to this power supply???
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I built a box to replace our aging SMTP gateway server a few months ago w/ dual Opteron 2 GHz, 2GB Corsair PC3200, mirrored 40GB U320 drives, Optical drive, a couple of 120mm intake and a couple of 80mm exhaust fans, and an Antec TruePower 550W PSU.
I wound up getting to take it home for burn in and slapped my FX5900 Ultra in it to see what it could do with some games, 3DMark, etc. This set up booted instantaneously every time, voltages were rock solid at the default settings, and the power supply barely got warm after 8 hour runs of 3DMark.
A 1KW power supply is total overkill unless you're building a 4 way, SLI box w/ a 4 TB array in it. Also, I've had nothing but good luck w/ Antec power supplies.
two future products will easily need this
1. the new tyan opteron board with 4 CPUs or 8 with the mezzanine board
2. upcoming nVidia SLI GPUs, 2 now stretch a 500 watt, I can't imagine what the new ones will do
640 Watts should be enough for anybody!
Haha...how true :) I've got an Enermax WhisperQuiet, 450 watts...that thing is a brick. Then again, it's been running almost continuously for something like 5 years now. It's only been shut off for the times I've moved, and the times I've torn out the old computer and built the new one. The thing is a beast...and it just...won't...stop.
It cost a lot when I bought it, but it is ohhhh so worth it.
It's almost as nuts as using an Athlon 64 for word processing.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'm RMA'ing a 450W Antec that I bought not 9 months ago, because the 3.3+ volt rail dips to as low as 2.7
Vcore (1.75) is also putting out higher at around 1.8, which I think is causing my CPU to overheat under load.
I won't be happy until I get my 1.21 gigawatt PSU so my flux capacitor will function correctly. Btw, anyone selling a DeLorean parts car? I need new door handles for my time machine. My damn mutt Copernicus chewed up the interior last time I sent him to the ice age.
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
By the way, the Hyabusa only has 160HP but it makes it up to 13,000 RPM (instead of probably 5,000 RPM in the V8 bike). Akin to F1 cars that rev up to 21,000 RPM. GIS
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
...Peltier Cooling.
If you're using a Peltier for cooling the CPU down to ambient or below for overclocking, you're going to need either this sort of power supply or some serious redundant units. The 120W Peltiers eat an unbelieveable fourteen amperes at 15 VDC. That's 210W by itself. Any other craziness like that and that wattage gets burned up quickly.
Now, does one NEED something like this? No.
But I am glad that there's a real high-end for switching supplies for personal computers these days. 500's okay for most setups, but I can see a 1kW supply being useful for others (i.e. all in a nice single case instead strung all over creation...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Having worked at the 26th NORAD blockhouse at Luke AFB, Arizona, I can certainly agree -- Them suckers are Big!
The computer itself was many dozens of floor-to-ceiling racks about 50 feet long. The racks were pressurized with cool air. The tubes were mounted 4 to 6 in a tray similar to server rack trays. The base of each tube mount had a rubber baffle clearing the tube by about 1/4 inch to let the cool air in the rack flow past the tube. The warmed air served as building heat. The tube trays could be hot-swapped or individual tubes replaced as needed.
For anybody who remembers an old TV series called "The Time Tunnel", the big blinky control panel (with rows and rows of toggle and paddle switchs) with the 15 inch ocilliscope in the middle was basically a SAGE computer control station. I think they got it surplus from IBM or somebody.
Also of note is a tool built so the SAGE could finish the Detect-Identify-Respond loop: the F-106 Delta Dart supersonic interceptor. It carried various missles, including atomic warheads, to destroy hostile interlopers, commie or otherwise. In full-up SAGE operations, the SAGE operators in their blockhouses could directly steer the F-106 aircraft and fire missles at the bad guys, all by computer control. The pilot got the plane off the ground and back on the runway afterwards. Not exactly Missle Command or Defender, but you get the idea.
<nitpick>Oh - NORth American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was it's own entity, a designated military command on par with Stratagic Air Command (SAC).</nitpick>
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Dual-core, four-socket Opteron SLI workstation goodness:
r ticle.jsp?id=33905
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewa
Jigga, what? Motorcycles only have two wheels, which is the square root of the number of wheels on a Delorean. So obviously you divide by 1 million to get the power requirement for a flux capacitor on a motorcycle. ;-D
Who will actually have a need for this PSU ...
... and when this amount of power is being consumed, shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems (or perhaps energy efficiency) instead?
Well, who could ever use more than 640Kb of memory?
Is there some secret power limit that I am unaware of here? Energy efficiency is certainly good, but just because we've reached the 1kW mark doesn't automagically mean we're using too much power!
Works just great on my other machine that's an AMD 1700 with only one HD.
I will concur on that, I had to replace a powersupply in an older machine recently. I put in it a 250watt power supply that I had used to get an AMD K6-II working. So that power supply is old but not ancient, but it worked in an Athlon 1900+ with one hard drive, one optical, and an ATI 9200. I was happy with the fix because otherwise I would've had to shell out some more cash.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I was just shopping for a new Dell server last night and I noticed the system I was considering purchasing included a 930W PS (maybe 960)! I became affraid and purchased the one below it (PowerEdge 1800) but still a TON of power. The upside, no heating required in the winter! And just to clarify, I am ok with my millimeter size penis, I just need my home computer to be in a VERY large case with lots of lights and fans. My only problem with current cases on the market, they have a really small ON button. Havent we learned anything from the stereo market, BIG KNOBS sell!!!
The heavier the power supply, generally, the higher quality.
My poli sci prof used to always say, "To grade your midterms, I'm going to throw them down the stairs. The ones that are heaviest with knowledge will fly the farthest."
He also said, "If your PSU weighs the same as a duck, it's made of wood!"
Hey that type R sticker gives me "look-fast" speed.
Wouldn't it be possible to make a PSU that adjusts its power rating to what is required? It seems daft to have to get a PSU that only runs anywhere close to maximum capacity for a few seconds when spinning up drives at boot up, and then spends the rest of its time wasting electricity.
Why not have a 1kW PSU that can supply 1kW max, but draws 150W (or whatever you computer needs) the rest of the time?
Processors seem to be able to do this. Why not PSUs?
We build 8, 12 and 16 HDD RAID array boxes all the time. Every single one of them has a triple or quadruple redundant power supply. The 16 disk 3U unit i'm putting together now has a 3 way redundant 650 watt power supply. Each independent unit is rated at 350 watts. I've seen one of these work with 16 drives going and two power supplies out. Oh yeah, it's a dual opteron with 8 high speed case fans, too. So it's not exactly low power. Right now, our customers are far more concerned with reliability and power consumption. Some of them have 200-300 node clusters. That's a lot of watts.
Thankfully they all run AMD boxes. If it were Intel, or I'd have to recommend installing some water cooling and turning their operations center into a sauna. Our Intel rep came by this year, he wanted to know why we were buying so few Intel chips this year. We said, make a chip that doesn't suck so much juice, that's what our customers want. He said, we have a nice dual core coming out... We said, does it suck lots of juice? He said yes, but we're working on that. We said, that's nice, come back when you have it figured out.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I've got a solution that will solve your problem: take all the 20 dollar bills taped to your computer, and mail them to me (I need a half height rack for my servers).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Just as a point of fact...
:P
"I can't even imagine how you could build a desktop system that would ever need much more than 1/2 that PSU's possible output."
Nvidia recomend (and after testing, so would I) that you use at least a 500W PSU for ANY SLI system, of course forgetting peeps who like to have a mini raid5 sata setup in their gameing rig
...
I believe (as i stated elsewhere) most suplyers are recomending a 500W or higher PSU for SLI systems.
:)
Not of course to forget that the prospect that nvidia (and ati for that matter) will be allowing more than 2 GPUs to be slaved together (think SLI "dual" 7800 ultra cards eating 220W each) could tip power requirements toward the nasty 1kW mark soon
...
No one in there right mind is going to use 4 Raid cards to run 16 Drives. They would use 2 8 port cards. Some who don't know better thinking they will get better performance may but they really don't understand the technology. PCI multiple and PCI-X slots share the same bus and thus bandwidth so splitting up the cards across more slots doesn't get you more bandwidth. Most server boards only come with like 2 PCI-X buses and each bus only supports 133 MHz slot (if that).
Modern SATA/IDE drives run at about 7 Watts under load and 15 Watts at startup. The problem with raid array is always startup so you need to have enough power to start the system up. So for a 16 Drive SATA setup you only need an extra 240W. So since I can build a dual core opteron box that only requires about 300-320 at startup at 600 or 650 Watt power supply is adequate. Now you want to make sure the power supply actually gives 600 or 650 watts of power so you will want a power factor corrected power supply. Often lower end power supplies don't correct for the power factor when rating the power of the supply so you won't actually get the rated power.
Now SCSI is another animal. You probably want at least 25W per drive at startup or you definitely need to stagger drive spinup. Often when designing systems we don't ship systems that can handle all drives being spun up at the same time. Why? Because we can't prevent the user from changing the setup from staggered spinup to normal.
So for a 16 Drive SCSI system you want to allow 400Watts for the Drives or with my previous example dual core opteron a 750Watt power supply.
Oh look we still aren't at 1000Watts.
One advantage of having more power than you need is that power supplies like cars last longer when then aren't driving hard. So you could go with a larger power supply to help extend it's life.
Though even taking that into account unless this enermax isn't power factor corrected, you still have a lot of extra power.
The only thing I can think of that might be a reason for this big of a workstation power supply is a high end graphics box with multiple high power graphics cards and a raid array to boot.
Room to spare? tried a clamp meter on your rails to test that? have seen many systems with basic amd 754 chip (semp2800w/64), half a gig of ram, small (120 is small these days right?) hard disk bork at a 6600GT with a 350W psu.
...
I'm familiar with Coolermaster. iirc, I think I had a CPU fan of that make in my old AMD Duron system once. The bearings in it went to hell in a hurry so I replaced it with an Antec. I would guess that flaky PSUs aren't the only things that they make. ;-)
...until your PSU shorts out and dumps 120V AC onto the 12V rail as happened recently in my brother's computer. He lost almost every component in the system. He nearly lost a lot of data too, but fortunately swapping logic boards on the drives got it back.
A really good power supply would have a very unlikely chance of failing in this manner though. There is always something to be said for buying quality power supplies even if you don't want to spring for redundant units, etc, though so many people overlook it.
> Often lower end power supplies don't correct for the power factor when
> rating the power of the supply so you won't actually get the rated power.
Umm, power factor correction doesn't have anything to do with what power the thing supplies to the load. It has to do with what it does (or doesn't do, really) to the mains in the process. A regular uncorrected supply draws its power out of sync with the incoming power curve, so it screws up the circuit, makes the power company's equipment work harder, and messes up the sine wave for other things on the circuit, but it can still deliver the power it's rated to deliver, or if it can't, lack of power correction isn't the reason.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I thought it was 5/6 of a solar system that rodney blew up, not to stoke any egos or anything....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
> Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer,
> larger supplies actually be more efficient?
Maybe, but which would you rather have, more efficient, or more robust? Bear in mind that this is a cluster, so while performance and efficiency scale linearly, the mean time between failures is inversely geometrically proportional to the number of nodes, unless there is some kind of protective redundancy built into the clustering method, in which case, efficiency goes out the window anyway.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
How about SETI@Home stacks? Several people are building clusters of various sorts for SETI, and probably other distributed projects as well. There are some great images at http://bhs.broo.k12.wv.us/homepage/staff/seti/farm s.htm.
I'd probably want something as efficient as possible, perhaps provide some redundancy, etc., but there are probably situations where space is a problem, etc.
Different strokes, people. Choice is a Good Thing.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
and for 4k less I'll put NOS and a turbo in a Honda Civic CRX and smoke your evo!
bite my glorious golden ass.
Actually, this is quite good for the "extreme cooling" types. Right now, if you want peltier+watercooling, you need two power supplies: one for the peltier element, and one for the rest of the computer. A thousand-watt PSU will be able to power the entire system at the same time.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
And for $10,000 total I'll buy a sport-bike that will smoke all of them.
What's your point?
Nothing to see here
Yeah, but if you have a 400 W supply and are really using 450 W instead of 350 and don't realize it, you'll get a big BANG and have to spend a lot more bucks.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
In North America, we do have ~230V... the distribution transformer has a center-tap to ground and the distribution boxes are wired to split the circuit in two balanced serial circuits across the mains bus to minimize ground/neutral current. For 230V appliances (stove, central AC, heating, etc.), we simply 'breaker' them across the buses.
Other than the local electric code and convenience, there is nothing else preventing people from wiring a NA house to have 230V everywhere.
Although you are somewhat right, your guesswork about power supply quality is mostly quessing. Higher power rating and higher cost do not contribute to quality. And the more iternal components you have, the lower your reliability. It's true that bigger heatsinks weigh more if both are from the same material, and larger transformers weigh more than smaller ones. However a good fan offsets the heatsink size, a larger heatsink allows a slower and quieter fan. A heavy steel case is no better than a lightweight aluminum case, but one weighs more. Your one statement is mostly true. A higher quality product generally costs more than a lower cost one, but with power supplies that is not necessarily so.
And if the plan is to continue operation after one of three dies, then the design criteria is to specify a power supply size such that the other two are capable of continuous operation at full system load and at maximum air temperature. If it does not do that, then it is not a redundant system. It is just a three power supply system.
But consider that the Cray X1E can have up to 64 cabinets, each of which can use 65kW (see this), so it's still "fiddling small change" to paraphrase Douglas Adams.
Why on earth would one use this in a server?
I'm sorry, you must be referring to those toy computers you refer to as a server--they don't need this.
I suppose someone having something more than a...what do you kids call it now? Pentium? 486?...might possibly need more power.
Such "balanced" systems have been in local use here in the past, but our standard 230V system has a neutral and a 230V live wire.
The distribution network is 3-phase, delivering 3 230V phases with 400V between the phases.
Higher-power motors and equipment that consumes more than about 3kW uses a 3-phase connection, and can use either the 3 230V "star" phases or the 3 400V inter-phase voltages in a "triangle" configuration.
Maybe there is not a huge overlap in their roles, but the fact remaines that I know a lot of admins that are playing games at home. And yes, that are the people that buy SLI gaming rigs, because they think it's cool to have, and they've got the money to actually buy it. Working geeks like me have all the good stuff :)
I have some mid range HP servers here that draw less amps. A 32CPU 32GB server only needs a 63A supply. No HDs as they are all in 8Tb array with 2 32A supplies. SO this seems a tad excessive for a PC !
Balancing is not applicable to single-ended circuits... it is only applicable to split (like NA's 2x115) and multi-phase circuits.
As for the three phase distribution, this is international common practice and completely irrelevant here.
The point of my original post was that domestic power is ~230V in NA too, it is simply split into 2x115V at the distribution panel for the small circuits.
There is a real difference between a nice 350 and a cheap 350. The nice ones are actually rated to have a constant load of 350 or a little higher, wheras the cheap 350s are rated to peak at 350, and the 12v rails are very low power, which is the killer.
Just a curious question though - as people start to use Tyan motherboards (for example) that support 4 dual-core Opteron chips will we need this kind of power supply?
It has also been my experience from traveling in Europe that our electric is a bit more reliable then yours
I haven't travelled outside Europe, but from news reports I hear, the USA has significantly less reliable power than we do.
Thanks to our split-phase setup we have the choice between 120V and 208/240V depending on application.
We have a choice in the UK too - 240v (officialy 230v) or three-phase 415v. I believe that other European countries sometimes use two phases at a similar voltage for cookers.
Our light bulbs also last longer then yours
Our light bulbs don't get dimmer at the other end of the house!
A latent existence
VCore is regulated by the motherboard. I'm not saying the PSU isn't the root cause...but you can't directly blame the PSU for that one.
± 29 dB
Our light bulbs don't get dimmer at the other end of the house!
Ummm. Neither do ours unless your wiring is grossly overloaded or undersized. The voltage drop on a lousy 100 watts with 14 or 12 gauge AWG cable isn't even worth calcuating.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
As to your comment about the Delta Dart and its radio control; how did they ever sneak that one past the Air Force brass and the pilots, given their well-documented love of manned airplanes, the well-known example of what the astronauts forced the designers to do to their space capsules, and the not unreasonable fear that 1950's valve electronics weren't really up to the job of controlling a rather finicky interceptor?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This unit is "1KW" only in the cut-throat realm of the PC industry. As with any PC supply, the rule-of-thumb is to use no more than half the rated output if you expect it perform well and be reliable.
What power supply is this? (Brand/Model#)
I've seen lots of power supplies, but never any that lie about their rating like that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What power supply is this? (Brand/Model#)
Deer LC-300ATX... might also be L&C Technology, or low cost. I think I bought it close to the year 2000. It was in a full tower case I wanted and at the time I was running a either an amd k6-3 400, or a pentium III 500. It was before the i820 chip was recalled.
I've seen lots of power supplies, but never any that lie about their rating like that.
Well I can't say I was lied to... it was in a case and the specs were not listed on the box. Worked just fine for a number of years till I upgraded to an athlon 1700 at which time the biostar rejected it one day. Odd beep code that was resolved with a PS swap. Kept it around for troubleshooting but now I know how bad it is, as in others have had similar complaints about it, it's getting trashed.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
dude the maximum that a Royal Navy HF Whip aerial is 1KW why would you need that power in a computer
Interesting, Oh no wait the other thing, Tedious
I think we are both arguing the same point. Basically, I am saying that if you are going this route, and have a manageable load, the best way to get a 'true redundant' power supply is with two large PSes, each capable of running the full load. Going with more than two, in my experience, leads to more downtime. Granted, I am not a hardware engineer, but I have worked with a great deal of equipment, and the two PS solution appears to be more reliable.
The general rule of thumb for the quality of a power supply is the weight. The heavier the power supply, generally, the higher quality.
It's a tad late to respond to this, but I will anyway.
This is a common rule of thumb among audio equipment. When I was in a market for an amp for my truck... nothing fancy... just something to make the speakers louder than the engine, I used the rule of thumb of heavier = better. And I found some heavy amps too.
They had lead weights in them bolted to the inside of the cover.
A better rule of thumb is to measture the temp out of your power supply. If it's too warm either the cooling fans are inadquate or the vr are overworked, in which case it's best to upgrade.
But needless to say one should consider huge heat syncs, and huge caps, things you tend not to find in cheepo power supplies. You can really notice the difference when you hookup your PC to a battery backup. If your system reboots you have crap.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
To run my VAX-11/750 (up to 2700W).
I also have a Sun 3/160, like the parent's, with a PSU rated at 850W. Sounds like a jet aircraft powered up, and has fans to match...
you had me at #!
True. I didn't mention the center tapped method as it doesn't apply to computer power supplies.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
The system will not boot until PowerGood is asserted from the power supply. Low quality power supplies tend to just use a fixed timer to assert this signal. Higher quality ones actually assert it based on the voltage as it ramps up.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
"no SLI on this board for some reason"
It has 2 x16 PCI-e slots, so, yes you can run SLI. Not only that, those slots are both true x16, unlike on consumer boards where you are sharing a single bus, thus effectively making them x8 slots. Which is not actually all that big a problem because the graphics cards (Nvidia at least, which is the only one that counts in this segment at the moment) do not use the bandwidth effectively yet, at least compared with cards like Myrinet's.
Note: this post regurgitated from half-digested gpgpu.org posts - go there if you actually want to read someone who knows what he is talking about.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"And the more iternal components you have, the lower your reliability."
That's what the military "thinks", but it just isn't true. Adding fuses, protection diodes, extra bypass capacitors, redundant fail-safe circuits, and often active monitoring circuits all increase real-world reliability. And extra fans are particularly important, especially since they fail all the time, particularly in cheap PSUs. Adding additional non-protective components in the critical circuit path does reduce reliability, but it's not true in general.
Yes, you can overpay for a PSU - but a cheap PSU is hardly ever a bargain. There is hardly another part of a computer where "you get what you pay for" is so true.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
You have made a number of statements that sound good to most engineers,including me, but still has no supporting data, at least none I have seen. Adding fuses and protection devices cannot increase reliability. They only protect after a failure has occurred. Extra bypass caps are added to reduce stress ratio in each, but if the failure is a short condition, you have two devices that can fail instead of one. Redundant circuits can increase the up-time, since up-time is more important than the mil 217 calculations of reliability.
Fans don't fail all the time. Only poorly designed fans fail, and two of those do not increase reliability. One good fan will increase reliability.
I would like to rephrase your last lines. You can overpay for a good PSU but you will always overpay for a poorly designed PSU. Like every component in a low cost computer, you can expect to get what you pay for.
nobody mentioned the fact that home outlets can only carry 1800w of power. if one of these is using maximum wattage along with other appliances and computer hardware then it wont be hard to trip the safety switch in the fuse box.
Set the clock on your computer. You are a few minutes fast. http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptsync.asp
Well, somebody is fast!
"My penis is like a Harly Davidson. It's big, black, comes out of my crotch, and it has many fat hairy men wearing lots of leather riding it."
- Anonymous at somethingawful.com
The difference is that a flathead Ford V8 develops, according to your link, 60hp, while my boxer twin BMW motorcycle engine beats that and gets 45mpg and a Boss Hoss motorcycle probably beats 300hp given what little I know of Chevy V8 engines.