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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?"
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..
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...
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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
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,
and you can get tha bastards for cheap these days, $7000 out the door with a qfe and 20 36 giggers from most gray market vendors. They're loud and chew a ton of power but if you buy a empty 450 chassis for 2K and a pile of 146GB scsi drives (425/per on pricewatch), you're looking at a > 2.5TB raid 5 array plus a box powerfull enough to still run just about any site out on the net, all for ~6000. Slap in a couple of QFE's and compile samba and you have a monster file server for your users on the cheap.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
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!!
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
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.
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).
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
Snap. Me too. I am glad somebody else has got one. I was given my 670MP when a friend was clearing out his office. Mine is sitting in the garage as it is too power hungry to run.
I only turn it on occasionally to demonstrate to people how loud it is. When the first set of fans kick in it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Everybody laughs and says that its loud.
Then the second lot of fans kick in and the floor starts to shake.
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.
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