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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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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...
Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer, larger supplies actually be more efficient?
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!
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).
One gallon of Gas contains roughly 34kWh of energy, so a 10 mile commute at 30mpg cones to about 22kWh round trip (assuming that that 34kWh is the available energy capacity). Next to that, 1kW for 8 hours is nothing.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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!!
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.
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.
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?
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.