A Kilowatt of Power

An anonymous reader writes "There is finally a review available of a kilowatt power supply. The PC Power and Cooling 1KW produces 1000W of power output with 1100W peak. The review points out how great this product did in the testing but was not afraid to admit how much of an overkill it is for the enthusiast market. From the article, 'In the current computing world, where more always equals "better than" the 1KW is king.'"

Comments

Re:Buh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The next thing they'll be telling us is that it's better to have $1000.00 than $100.00, vehicles with better gas mileage will save money, doctors make more money than fry cooks, and Linux is better than Windows.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a $100 price tag than a $1000 one, a $9,000 vehicle with 39 MPG will probably cost less than a $29,000 one with 49 MPG, I've met some shifty doctors and once a rich fry cook (I think he was selling weed to the stoners that hang out at the McDonalds...), and if you'll excuse me, I have to manually edit some files for the next week trying to get my sound card working because Windows sucks!

okay Lets start counting.

[JollyFinn]

I just rounded few PEAK consumption figures.

125 wats x2 for the GFX cards.
100 Wats x4 for the fastest dualcore opterons.
15 wats x 10 for the 15krpm SCSI:s.
10 wats x 16 for ram.
Soundcard,chipset,network, DVD writer. 40 wats total.

1000 wats total,

TYAN thunder K8QW is the motherboard where everything fits.

Sure 1kw is overkill for with mass market enthuastics but don't underestimate the needs of the rich.
So 8 cores and 32GB of ram, and large SCSI raid array and two fastest GFX cards, it might be overkill but its most certainly the fastest system, for everyday linux desktop usage, with a multithreaded app.
Sure the system is not cheap, but there are multiple situations where such "desktop" system would be warranted.
One is with a 100k$ per user workstation application use by 100k$ per year employee, another is when you have millions and don't care about the price.

Re:Overkill?

[DrEldarion]

Bah, death is just proof that you're that hardcore.

Re:Read the article

[MechaStreisand]

No, sir, the power supply is a switcher, not a linear power supply. All computer power supplies are. They do not operate by continuously wasting power - instead they transform the line power into the desired voltage and current at around 88% efficiency (depending on the model) all the way from a minimal load to a full load. In fact, for a normal load, this power supply won't draw any more wall current than a 300 watt supply - but it will be able to draw a lot more if it needs to, without failing, if its claims are true.

Who needs that?

[bombshelter13]

A few days ago, I installed a Thermaltake TWV-480 in one of my machines. This is a power supply that inclues a front bay panel with an LCD display telling you how many watts of power are currently being used. The machine is a Pentium 4 2.4ghz with a Radeon 9600 Pro, a CD burner, four hard drives and several USB devices.

Since installing the panel, the machine idles around 50 watts or so, spikes up to perhaps 55 if I turn up the fan speeds (which is rarely necessary), and maybe 60-75 or so for a few brief moments when I'm doing something that requires heavy disk access like openning a large file (or group of files).

I can't possibly imagine that newer, more powerful hardware would consume a full two orders of magnitude more power than this machine, especially given the great work we've all heard being done recently in heat and power efficiency with AMD's newer chips Cool 'n' Quiet tech and Intels Pentium Ms. So given that, who needs this much power?

Re:Pfffft

[Technician]

Not trying to be an ass but it hurts the eyes when so many posts including opening article have kW wrong. It is kW not KW. It has a small k because kilo isn't taken from somebody's name.


I found a list of metric prefixes.

I have no idea why Kilo is not uppercase as are most multiplyers of greater than unity. In common pratice is is common for greater then unity multiplyers to be uppercase to avoid confusion with less then unity multiplyers. That is why most street signs read KM to the next exit and transistors are measured in nm and leakage current is measured in uA.

Prefix Symbol Multiplier Exp
yotta- Y 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 10+24
zetta- Z 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 10+21
exa- E 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 10+18
peta- P 1 000 000 000 000 000 10+15
tera- T 1 000 000 000 000 10+12
giga- G 1 000 000 000 10+9
mega- M 1 000 000 10+6
kilo- k 1 000 10+3
hecto- h 100 10+2
deca- da 10 10+1
deci- d 0.1 10-1
centi- c 0.01 10-2
milli- m 0.001 10-3
micro- 0.000 001 10-6
nano- n 0.000 000 001 10-9
pico- p 0.000 000 000 001 10-12
femto- f 0.000 000 000 000 001 10-15
atto- a 0.000 000 000 000 000 001 10-18
zepto- z 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001 10-21
yocto- y 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 10-24

Re:question for you EE nerds...

[Slashcrap]

Does a power supply necessarily use it's rated power output all the time, or is that just the rated maximum wattage output?

Of course it does! That is why you must never, ever power up a PSU with nothing connected to it. If you did, that whole 1kW would have to be dissipated in the PSU leading to instant meltdown and you having to pick pieces of red hot metal out of your face.

It's the same with power plants - if demand for power suddenly dropped far enough, every power plant in the country would explode with untapped potential.

I think it was rather irresponsible of you to raise such a dangerous subject on Slashdot. Please report to your nearest DHS reception centre for re-conditioning.