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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."
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Antec+Phantom+ 500+(PHANTOM+500)+500-Watt+Power+Supply&btnG=Searc h+Froogle&scoring=p
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i did not find word "dB" in there..
The topic of silent power production has been an important one to the computer community recently.
Yes, the topic of silent power production has been an important one to the computer community recently. Right alongside in-home cold fusion and perpetual motion machines. Oh wait, did you mean silent power conversion?
Netbooks, they come with Linux or a $3 copy of Windows. Either way, Microsoft loses.
I remember that the story was discussing how the advertised wattages of these power supplies were pretty much lies or gross exaggerations. So we're talking about 500W of power without cooling, but how much power can be drawn until the thing dies from heat exhaustion? And can the 500W output be sustained for extended lengths of time?
Also, does anyone find really strange that slashdot would put the CSS definition files in the images.slashdot.org domain? One computer I use shows Slashdot completely stripped down. This one shows it "normally". Any way to get rid of advertisements and images without losing the formatting as well?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
You're better off buying a high-efficiency power supply that has a 120mm thermistor-controlled fan. Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The 120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and not too bad at higher loads. High efficiency means less waste heat for the fan to need to cool and lower electric bills.
I want my power supply to be loud. I need as much white noise as I can get.
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.
Fully agree. The excellent (french) hardware site http://www.matbe.com/ has just tested yesterday the 600W version and it squashes the competition :
1 2-600-watts-l--alim-parfaite/
http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/250/seasonic-s
Even if you can't read french, look at the figures especially the one concening the silence, it's almost as silent as a fanless yesico!
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
here
Having just discovered this power supply a few days ago, I can definitely say its going in my next PC. Although my primary machine thus far has been an Apple Powerbook, I can definite say that I miss a decent windows computer in my life (I switched to mac just this April). A friend asked me to troubleshoot his PC just a few days ago and scarily enough it took a few seconds to get into the groove of things in his windows environment.
Having said that, the value of a good power supply in your computer is second to none and the power supplies from Antec have never disappointed.
What intrigues me about this particular model is that unlike its less powerful brothers it actually does have a fan. Though under light loads the fan stays off or does very little spinning. For a computer I am building that is doubling as both a light gaming machine and a PVR the large rated output and silent properties make for one killer combination.
And thats what I tell myself every single dang day so I can justify its 200 dollar price tag!
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
Do you really need that much power?
I understand how the proliferation of the p4 and its space heater specs created a bit of a backlash against the modern computer and its exponential power requirements & noise generation, but I think it's gone overboard. Who doesn't have some kind of background noise on the computer be it, a movie, or mp3 playing. How really big is the market for absolute silence, beyond media pc's, where high power requirements shouldn't exist.
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.
Don't forget to invest at least $50US into a UPS, so that your investment is isolated from surges, and browouts. You'll also benefit from being mostly immune from short power flickers, as long as your modem and router are backed up by the battery in the UPS too.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
.. a comment disparaging yet-to-be-released Windoze
Blog: http://richardrandomrants.blogspot.com/
Power is defined as energy transmitted/consumed/converted per unit time. A battery (like a fuel tank, or a dam) stores energy. Unplugged, power is zero. When you draw from it, it's producing power, and drawing down its energy reserves to do so.
Things get simpler when you use precise language, and avoid confusing yourself.
Nowadays he's at Oqo.
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.
For all you guys jumpin' to get this, the detailed specs of it are located here, as well as a place to buy it. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16817103926#DetailSpecs
It has a fan.
Silent = no fan
Quiet = quiet fan
(2x fan -> ! Quiet)
IMO
(I now have a silent 350W power supply)
The human brain uses 50 watts.
Now that the motors on (consumer level) hard drives are nearly silent, the loudest source of noise from your computer is probably the processor fan, followed by any small peripheral fans such as those found on video cards and motherboard chipsets. The power supply fan is probably the quietest moving part in your PC.
Power supplies also make the least distracting sound (IMO) because the large, slow fans produce more of a whoosh than a whine. Try powering on your computer with your processor out and no drives plugged in to see what I mean.
Hands in my pocket
This is a typical PSU review, that is to say worthless. The problem is to do a good PSU reivew you actually need quite a bit of hardware, most little online sites lack even the most basic testing tools (a good multimeter and a controllable load). They make no mention of how they measured the voltages (software, or voltmeter, and from where, pigtail, ATX connector, somewhere else), they put a system that probably doesn't draw 125W DC at load to test out a 500W PSU, they have no real PSU temperature or efficency information. Typical of a site who's reviewing expertiese consists soley of swaping out parts, running 3D Mark and reporting the difference.
Silent PC Review does half way decent reviews, and over the last year or so XBit Labs has starting doing very good PSU reviews. Beyond that there aren't too many places that consistantly hit the mark.
For a silent PSU (not sure why this is that big of a deal, I have a TruePower 330W and can't hear it over the HDD, but I guess some people will always pay for that last dB quieter), there's of course the Phantom 300, the SilverStone 'NF' series, a 300 and a 400W version, the Fortron Source Zen 300; recently reviewed on XBitLabs and Silent PC Review, with just rock solid voltages across the spectrum. And of course the SeaSonic S12 line while not fanless is known to be extremely quiet and highly efficient
Wow, only $150. What a bargain!
[/sarcasm]
Do the Slashvertizements cost less if they're posted this late?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I had just built a new computer with a 90nm Athlon64 and a 500W power supply. This is mainly for work, so no hot/fancy GPU. The CPU heatsink is absolutely cold to the touch. The air blown from inside the case feels exactly the same temperature as background. But, the air that comes out of the power supply is noticably warm. It really seems like the power supply is the only thing that is actually producing any heat. Is this typical of modern systems? How much more difficult is it to make efficient power supplies? Somehow I feel even worse about all the power I waste on power supply inefficiency than the power I waste with my CPU.
Basically there is no way that heat sink should be cold. The heat must be going somewhere. If your heatsink is not seated correctly, the heat is going back through the CPU pins to the motherboard, which will go bang some time in the near future.
I know you are probably very skilled and good, but please... just humour me... everybody could make a mistake.
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.
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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.
To put things into perspective, 10 dBA would be a completely unobstructed 80mm fan at less than 1000 RPM. (And a _good_ fan at that. El-cheapo ball bearing fans are noisier.) You can easily get PSU fans which are around the 30 dBA mark at full speed. E.g., a "silent" Tagan I bought has 28 dBA ones, but it's two of them, so make that 31 dBA for both.
Again, that's for completely unobstructed fans. When you have a fan blowing against an obstruction (e.g., a heatsink), it will make an extra whoosh or whistle. When you have something obstructing its intake, as is the case with most exhaust fans on PSUs, then it makes even more noise. Spin a 28 dBA fan to full speed when it has a big heatsink obstructing its intake, and it really starts to scream.
And you can reach full speed easier than you think. Most of these "silent" PSUs are happy to give you the dBA number when it's running completely idle and in a cold room. That's what it really means for most of them when you see "less than 20 dBA!!!" on the box: yeah, you'll get that if you don't draw more than 1A out of it, and you have your window open in December. Or rather, even then that would be what their fans would do at 5V if they were completely unobstructed, not what they do when mounted on the PSU. But put it in a power-hungry PC and run it on a hot August day, and you'll see most of them hitting the max RPM within minutes.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Once upon a time I've asked wife of one my friend, how she can tolerate humming of all his computers round the clock. And she explained that her father was captain of river ship, and she spent much of her childhood in the cabin aboard the ship. So she is used to an idea, that when engines run smoothly, everything is Ok, but if silence fells, something wrong have happened.
From TFA:
The Phantom 500 has been bumped up from 350W to 500W but has number of other interesting changes, the most important of which is the addition of a fan. This means this power supply is no longer fanless but is Antec has still labeled it as "silent".
Windows Vista will include a feature, code-named WinFan, that will deal with power supply heat dissipation in software.
Microsoft is rumored to be working on WinPSU, a software-implemented power supply for the next Windows version after Vista.For those who prefer the noise of a fan, WinFan will generate white noise through your sound card. There is already a rumor of a virus that replaces the white noise .wav file with the sound of a fan with failing bearings.
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"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Seriously dude?
... so you can't really get the GUI to work without the 256 Meg Card -- it isn't eye candy -- it's the whole interface and resources that will be used by future applications that want to take advantage of the Quartz--I mean Aqua technology. Plus, the services are going to require a processor that hasn't come out yet. All told, do you know of a 3Ghz CPU and 256 Meg 3D card that can run with less than a 400 Watt Power supply?
... Dude ...
... hmmm, Major.
Serious.
Dude?
Yeah. Serious.
Seriously serious.
Dude!
Well what about the minimum specs for the processor and graphics card? Dude?
Dude. Just a little eye candy.
Dude, they are offloading a 3D interface -- just like Core Graphics on the Mac to be rendered by the graphics card
Seriously Dude?
Serious.
Hey, I'm a Mac user and even I know that the specs aren't for eye candy. So serious.
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