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?"

Comments

what the..

[thegoogler]

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..

Sweeeeeeet....

[Jaime2]

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.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[AME]

I don't want to draw this thread too far off topic, but I must ask: How do you do your motion control?

I ask because I work for a motion control company, and for the benefit of those not knowledgable, simultaneous multi-axis motion is not for the faint of heart. We use custom hardware that includes a CPU and a rather capable FPGA to accomplish it. With that and several software trade secrets, we design, engineer, and program our own hardware.

I'm not saying it's impossible to do at home, but I've never considered it a hobbyist kind of thing to do. If you have, I'm impressed (and would indeed like to see pictures). If you've used some "off the shelf" motion control hardware, or else if you cheated on the simultaneous multi-access part then I'm considerably less impressed. Still a cool project, though.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[jtara]

Well, I implemented 5-axis servo motion control on an 8080 about 20 years ago. (The company was subsequently sold to Allen Bradley, which used the company's products to create their first microprocessor-based CNC controller. Prior to this, I believe they used HP mini-computers.)

The hardware - optical encoders with enough hardware to get the encoder values into a CPU-readable I/O register, and simple servo controllers with a hardware "velocity loop". (You give it a velocity value, and it tries it's darndest to keep the motor at that velocity.) Position and acceleration control done completely by software.

I did this for a parametrically-programmed (as opposed to a step-by-step CNC controller) tru-flute machine for this company. I implemented simimar software on a Z80 for another company, which used it to retrofit cam-operated lathes used to make turbo housings for diesel trucks. (Fewer axes, though - piece of cake.)

20 years later - I wouldn't be surprised to find quite a few hobbyists who could do it on a 4gHz Pentium IV...

I seem to recall hearing of some people who did this as a hobbyist project at the time. You see, pen plotters were not cheap...

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Gentlewhisper]

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.

What about Octal dual-core opteron servers?

[tcc]

check this baby out for example:

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.html

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 :) )

NetBSD Toaster

[billstewart]

You saw that NetBSD-based toaster at Linuxworld, didn't you?

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...

You better hope not

[overshoot]

Did you know that by now 10% of current electricity usage in the US is needed for computers?

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Trepalium]

Not to mention this rather large PC server from HP has dual redundant PSUs that each provide 1150W (1440W consumed). And this thing takes up to 4 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, and 8 Ultra320 SCSI drives. If you need more drives, you just hook up one of these to attach another 14 drives, which will consume up to another 537W of power. Unfortunately, you need to run this server off 200-240V power for the redundancy to work. IBM and Dell each have similar sets of products to accomplish the same things.

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.