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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
~DOCSANE
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.
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.
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...
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
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!
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.
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 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.
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
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
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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.
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 think he's confusing wattage with amperage.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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,
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.
Rail gun.
actually, 400W will be enough for those, provide that the rating is true 400W
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
I was going to check it on my TI-84+ Silver Graphite Platinum edition, but I got distracted by the pretty movies of the Matrix...
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".
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.
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!
Err, if it's a polynomial of degree 5, and there are 5 numbers listed that are supposed to be roots, then of course there are no nonreal roots -- the sum of the number of real roots and the number of nonreal roots equals the degree of the polynomial.
So REAL nerds recognized that you don't need to manually check it!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
Scsi cards have had this for at least 5 years. You can set them to delay spin up for 2*scsi id , so the drive with id 1 spins up at 2s, the drive with id 2 spins up after 4 s, etc. It's useful when a scsi chain can have up to 14 drives.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
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
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.
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?)
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?
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
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.
"Mains power" is English for what Americans call "outlet power".
Example usage "You can run this radio from a battery, or you can plug it into the mains".
No, that, folks, is the fundamental theorem of algebra.
All power supplies have a "sweet spot" from an efficiency standpoint which is normally 75% of rated power. That would imply that this power supply is most efficient around 750kW. At 350kWs I would guess this supply is only 65-75% efficent. Perhaps it is designed to be efficient across a broad range of output.
...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.
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