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Silent 500W Power Supply
NightRyder writes "To cope with the increased power demands of today's processors and video cards a 500W silent power supply has been released by Antec. The topic of silent power production has been an important one to the computer community recently, especially concerning the increased hardware demands by new game and operating systems. Considering the processing demands of something like, *cough* Windows Vista, its important to be able to keep your computer cool without it getting loud."
This powersupply looks nice but what is the news? The article even mentions that this is not antecs first silent power supply. There are also completely silent PSUs made by other companies with better efficiency than this.
With no fan, it should be pretty close to inaudaible from a couple of feet away.
I looked up the specs on one and it was 82% efficient at full power. That's 90 Watts of heat it needs to get rid of without a fan. Toasty!
It has a fan.
If that fan is moving, noise is generated.
Ergo it is not silent.
QED.
Silent Power Production is CONVERTING noisy power to silent power
/. editors should be able to find these pedantic little points, I think they've got their hands full with real spelling errors :) I mean, it's hard to argue that a PSU isn't outputting power...
Silent Power Production is converting AC to DC silently. I agree with your main points, though. Energy is conserved, therefore we're always converting it from something (mass, KE, various forms of PE, whatever).
Grandparent apparently thinks the
I've got 2 computers with 6 hard drives, a refrigerator and a small pepsi machine, my room sounds like a wind tunnel and that's just the way I like it!
I've really never been bothered by the noise, it's very loud in my room and I'm just used to it. If it was silent in here I'd never be able to fall asleep because I'm just used to hearing that noise in the background and that always helps me sleep. Kind of like a wave machine or something, it's peacefull. Lets me know we still have power. If I wanted to make a silent PC I could probably do it pretty easily, water cooled and kept in a box (like a wooden box or a cabinet or something like that) with sufficient ventilation.
While I am impressed with a quiet strong power supply I would rather see advances in NOT needed something this big. Though a single computer doesn't really draw that much power most of the people (read geeks) I know have a bunch of computers. I really don't want my computers drawing more power than the house next door.
.. a comment disparaging yet-to-be-released Windoze
Blog: http://richardrandomrants.blogspot.com/
Considering the processing demands of something like, *cough* Windows Vista, its important to be able to keep your computer cool without it getting loud."
/cry /moan /sob about Vista's requirements.
There have been a number of posts in recent weeks that have been all
High computing requirements are a fact of life when you have an operating system that has a fully abstracted graphics layer (OS X comes to mind). No doubt Vista will be "borrowing" the quartz architecture. From Apple's site "Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and later, or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required."
I don't read anything about people complaining that their G4 or G5 requires a dedicated GPU and very fast processor to run OS X. Apple has made their hardware such a black box that no one really notices that the hardware is generally several steps above the PC realm in terms of performance (though you wouldn't always know it). Microsoft is moving in a similar direction, though I'm sure that even thouse of us with integrated intel graphics cards will have a reasonable experience.
The funny thing is Mac users have had these hardware requirements (and cost) for over 4 years now.
My phantom 500w lasted about 5 days before it ceased to function in any computer I tried it in. Took the surge protector with it now.
A good test of this PSU will be to see how the manafacturer deals with my problem.
I have a relatively mild system, still power hungry, but not overly and it runs on a 250 Watt Sparkle PSU. Has been doing so for about 6 months, I though I needed a huge over the top PSU and I bought one, and it proceeded to take out one of my main HDD's, and it wasn't a bargain basement one either. That 250 watt psu runs a Asus A7V400 MB, 2 200gig SATA HDD's, 2 ATA 133 HDD's, DVD-ROM and DVD-RW, AMD XP 2700+ and a GeForce5200 Ultra, never a burp or complaint. I just don't understand why in the world you would need 500 watts of PSU unless you were running some quad CPU monster or something.
If you pay your taxes you support terrorism!
Geeze, dude, even skipping over the fact that MS never said 256 MB would be required, do you even understand what Windows uses a video card for?
_How_ is that card going to stay in use while you run a full-screen 3D game? No, really, what UI animations do you think Windows runs in the background while a game has the full screen? Why would it need to keep that RAM allocated? No, seriously.
For that matter, what do you think it uses it for when you're outside a game? Well, 99% of the time for nothing whatsoever, and the other 1% of the time for some fancy UI animation. And that's if it's a REALLY fancy UI.
So a slower graphics card would do... what? Animate those occasional fancy effects at 10 frames per second instead of 60? (And then go back to sitting idle.) Even skipping over the fact that you can turn that fancy stuff off completely, how's that going to force you to get a top graphics card and a 500W PSU?
So, please.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Am I the only one who takes silent to mean that it's never going to make any noise? I'm sure with the /. users out there, everybody asks the question, oh really, how would you do it?
Personally I would seal up the power supply, then have it filled with oil. Remove the fan, and coat the outside with heatsink bars. It's either that or alter the form factor of the powersupply by removing it from the console box. Probably combining it with an UPS and just use the extra area to properly disperse the heat, replacing the powersuppy box with an empty box that takes DC in and splits it up properly (just wires). You can also increase the efficiency of the box so it stops burning off a lot of power as heat. Or any combination of the three.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Hook up your UPS to a two 70AH car batteries and let it run unplugged at full-load for an hour, it will be hotter. I read many stories about UPSes overheating or even catching fire when run for too long beyond what their stock batteries would normally allow at full-load. UPSes meant for extended runs have fans... look at APC Back-UPS XS and RS series... the XS has no external battery connector and no fan while the equivalent RS has both the external battery connector and a fan.
Laptop bricks only provide 12-20VDC, the laptop itself has a number of extra converters in it to provide all the other voltages (Vcore, Vram, Vio, Vterm, 3.3V, 5V, etc.) from the battery and charge-controller circuitry. The laptops' external brick is there to decouple non-essential AC power circuitry from the mobile components, the laptop still requires local bulk power regulation. There is also the problem that an external PSU would have slower transient response times. With today's systems where the load can change by 10A in microseconds or less, an external PSU would probably need a secondary regulator (at least a large capacitor bank) inside the case. For a laptop, this is not an issue because everything goes through the battery controller. For ITX, this is not as much of an issue because they are mostly low-power systems.
Since technology is moving towards local voltage regulators for faster transient response, PCs should migrate towards single-rail power distribution (something like 24V with 20-35V tolerance for easy UPS) to avoid triple, quadruple, etc.-tuple conversions... converting directly from a single higher voltage source decreases the load on intermediate regulators, reducing conduction and switching losses across the board.
PSUs with efficiencies over 90% are possible but every 1% over 85% is more expensive than the last... synchronous rectification alone doubles the number of required high-speed, high-current MOSFETs and other parts.
I dare you to find one high-power linear regulator in your PC... all but the lightest loads are powered from linear regulators now. With modern integrated SMPS chips, putting switchers everywhere is relatively inexpensive.
Look at CPU voltage regulators... the Prescott VRM must be able to provide over 100A to the socket at as little as 1.4V. This would mean your low-drop-out regulator would be dissipating up to 190W. In the real world, motherboard manufacturers use multi-phase switchers fed from 12V.
Look at video cards... all current boards have onboard switching regulators... they all feature a Maxim, TI or other power modulator switches, some surface-mount MOSFETs all mounted around inductors and filter capacitors.
Look at next-generation Pentium-M, these will have on-board PWM regulator.
Look at recent TI newsletters, there have been lots of promos for chips designed for point-of-load power regulation.
Switchers are also into most voltage-sensitive devices to buck/boost battery voltage so they can be used more effectively and completely.
Switchers are everywhere and much more practical than you appear to think.