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?"

Awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

now I can get that USB powered Stargate I've had my eye on.

NetBSD Toaster

[billstewart]

You saw that NetBSD-based toaster at Linuxworld, didn't you?

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...

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Awesome...

[WaterBreath]

=) Good joke.

But having a BS-CE, and having done a senior project involving USB back in school, I can't just let the inaccuracy of that statement slide...

<pedantry>
The power capacity or amperage of the power supply will have no effect on an individual port-powered USB device. The USB standard divides devices into two power classes: low-power (less than 0.25A) and high-power (between 0.25A and 0.5A). And IIRC, one powered USB port can only source a maximum of 1A to all devices connected through that

Re:Awesome...

[Mercano]

If you count the number of solar systems destroyed and divide it by the number of times the galaxy has been saved, it sorta works out. Of course, they managed to destroy not one but two entire solar systems over the course of two hours last Friday, so your millage might varry.

Re:Awesome...

[Opie812]

What the hell are you crazy bastards talking aboot?

Re:Awesome...

[Gherald]

^ proof that all 4-digit UIDs haven't grown up yet ;)

You build it, one is born every minute to buy it

[stecoop]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[dr.badass]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[ari_j]

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 [bosshoss.com].

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[cgenman]

What about a component of a Raid Array box? 4 raid cards attached to 4 HDD's each, can draw a lot of juice.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Bastian]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[freidog]

not as much as you might think.

HDD Power consumption [storagereview.net]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[spun]

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

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[timeOday]

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.

That all depends on the size of the server, doesn't it? On a blade server with 20 or so processors, it might be great to have a pair of these per cabinet (1+1 failover).

Most clusters have a PSU per one or two processors, shouldn't fewer, larger supplies actually be more efficient?

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Trepalium]

Not to mention this rather large PC server [www.hp.ca] from HP has dual redundant PSUs that each provide 1150W (1440W consumed). And this thing takes up to 4 CPUs, 64GB of RAM, and 8 Ultra320 SCSI drives. If you need more drives, you just hook up one of these [hp.com] to attach another 14 drives, which will consume up to another 537W of power. Unfortunately, you need to run this server off 200-240V power for the redundancy to work. IBM and Dell each have similar sets of products to accomplish the same things.

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 [supermicro.com], 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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[HMC CS Major]

Probably high-end workstations, where you'll see 2 power-hungry processors pulling full load, busy disks, and a big graphics card.

It'll be purchased by a bunch of 18-25 year olds, but that's fine - let them drive the price down.

I imagine it should warm up some cold dorm rooms running Seti@Home or WorldCommunityGrid or something (mostly useless) like that...

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[jm92956n]

With the latest Intel processor, a pair of 6800's in SLI, two HD's in a RAID setup (plus a third disk for extensive storage), and a pair of optical drives, it almost seems plausible that one might need that kind of power.

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[MaineCoon]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

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...

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Eugene]

actually, 400W will be enough for those, provide that the rating is true 400W

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[FullCircle]

That is two boards (mother and daughter) with two powersupplies too.

You still won't need this monster.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[drsmithy]

[...] (no SLI on this board for some reason).

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".

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[fm6]

More likely, however, is that it's being done for bragging rights. Dodge, for example, put the Viper into production, even though ....

I think bragging rights are more important from the consumer end. Look at all the people who drive cars designed for offroading in the city. By the same token, lots of people will spend extra for extra power capacity they'll never use.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Jozer99]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[j4k3]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[John Biggabooty]

This thing will probably trip a standard 15 amp breaker.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Hadlock]

...And a 50 amp breaker that your stove top or water heater runs on.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[B747SP]

I think he's confusing wattage with amperage.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Gentlewhisper]

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.

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[zakezuke]

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

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 establ

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[zakezuke]

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.

W

Re:You build it, one is born every minute to buy i

[Guspaz]

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.

Redundant power?

[grub]

shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems

What? Two 1 kilowatt supplies? That'll save lots of power.. great idea!

Re:Redundant power?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What? Two 1 kilowatt supplies? That'll save lots of power.. great idea!

Actually, more like maybe fail-over, one doesn't turn on full until the other shows signs of dying.

Lots of servers have redundant power supplies, though they aren't stupid like this.

I don't think redundant power supplies really has a place in anything but servers though. Desktop PCs shouldn't be on unless they are actually being used, it's silly to waste electricity like that. Even for "heating" in the cold months, the cost per unit of

Re:Redundant power?

[grub]

The summary said "shouldn't we be thinking about redundant power systems (or perhaps energy efficiency) instead?" Energy efficiency I can agree with but why mention redundant power? I can't see the connection. Redundant power won't help with increased power demands only with keeping the demand fulfilled when the main systems fail.

Mmmm, tasty power.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

First quintic polynomial post

[Anonymous Coward]

AD 2005
1000 watts
1400 watts peak output
66 amps
1 quintic polynomial post

2005, 1000, 1400, 66 and 1 are the zeroes of

x^5 - 4472x^4 + 6507201x^3 - 3223494730x^2 + 188478992000x - 185262000000

Oh, noes, this is gonna be a new fad :)

[gardyloo]

Oh, and REAL nerds have recognized that that polynomial has no nonreal roots, and probably checked it by expanding (x-1)*(x-66)*(x-1400)*(x-1000)*(x-2005).

Re:Oh, noes, this is gonna be a new fad :)

[yellowbkpk]

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...

Re:Oh, noes, this is gonna be a new fad :)

[SailorFrag]

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!

That's nothing.

[Captain Scurvy]

Mine's one point twenty-one jigawatts.

One point twenty-one jigawatts?!

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:That's nothing.

[FooAtWFU]

What the hell is a jigawatt?

what the..

[thegoogler]

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..

Re:what the..

[rsmith-mac]

I'd imagine 1.4KW is a worst-case scenario. PSU effeciency can vary depending on load and temp, so at a really high load and temp(on the verge of melting down the PSU), an efficiency rate of 70%(for 980W output) is perfectly realistic. I'd expect however that for most cases it would be above 80%, so the total load would be under 1.25KW in that case.

Re:what the..

[zippthorne]

1400 watts "input" 1000 watts "outut"

sounds suspiciously like someone is making a square root of two error (perhaps by confusing peak to peak something with RMS of that something)

square root of 2 ~ 1.414

Re:what the..

[HardCase]

square root of 2 ~ 1.414

Now that's just irrational.

I'll admit it...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:I'll admit it...

[myukew]

if you ever had a girl in your room it would probably run off that power supply

Purpose

[Red Flayer]

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.

Sweeeeeeet....

[Jaime2]

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.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[khallow]

I can't let this pass. This is not right. You can't just say "5-axis home built CNC mill" and not provide pictures!

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[Jaime2]

It's no where near as exciting as it sounds. Right now I have a regular 3-axis mill with a rotary table as a fourth axis. The steppers draw up to 3A per coil, making 24A total. My fifth axis would be a second rotary table mounted 90 degrees on the first. It would make really nice chamfers without changing tools.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[AME]

I don't want to draw this thread too far off topic, but I must ask: How do you do your motion control?

I ask because I work for a motion control company, and for the benefit of those not knowledgable, simultaneous multi-axis motion is not for the faint of heart. We use custom hardware that includes a CPU and a rather capable FPGA to accomplish it. With that and several software trade secrets, we design, engineer, and program our own hardware.

I'm not saying it's impossible to do at home, but I've never considered it a hobbyist kind of thing to do. If you have, I'm impressed (and would indeed like to see pictures). If you've used some "off the shelf" motion control hardware, or else if you cheated on the simultaneous multi-access part then I'm considerably less impressed. Still a cool project, though.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[jtara]

Well, I implemented 5-axis servo motion control on an 8080 about 20 years ago. (The company was subsequently sold to Allen Bradley, which used the company's products to create their first microprocessor-based CNC controller. Prior to this, I believe they used HP mini-computers.)

The hardware - optical encoders with enough hardware to get the encoder values into a CPU-readable I/O register, and simple servo controllers with a hardware "velocity loop". (You give it a velocity value, and it tries it's darndest to keep the motor at that velocity.) Position and acceleration control done completely by software.

I did this for a parametrically-programmed (as opposed to a step-by-step CNC controller) tru-flute machine for this company. I implemented simimar software on a Z80 for another company, which used it to retrofit cam-operated lathes used to make turbo housings for diesel trucks. (Fewer axes, though - piece of cake.)

20 years later - I wouldn't be surprised to find quite a few hobbyists who could do it on a 4gHz Pentium IV...

I seem to recall hearing of some people who did this as a hobbyist project at the time. You see, pen plotters were not cheap...

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[Jaime2]

http://www.dakeng.com/turbocnc.html [dakeng.com]

It works more than well enough for me. I can hold better than 0.001 inch tolerance. BTW, I run it on a 200MHz Pentium. All the motor control stuff is home-made, based on L298 motor drivers.

The real trick is to do it from DOS. If you use windows then the timing has to be done in a real-time external box. DOS is already real-time.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[Midnight Thunder]

There appears to be a number of homebrew designs here [crankorgan.com]. One other thing that I noticed from my hour of looking at the subject yesterday is that you need a dedicated computer to control the system. There appears to be Penguin CNC [yty.net], which seems to do the job, using Realtime Linux.

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[SWPadnos]

I recently bought a manual Bridgeport milling machine, and am in the process of converting it to CNC.

I will be using Linux EMC [sourceforge.net] to control it. This is a program which uses Linux + either RTAI or RTLinux for realtime. It does 6-axis control, and has pluggable kinematics modules (ie, it can control X-Y-Z milling machines, Stewart platforms (hexapods), radial arm robots (like the PUMA 560), etc).

The G-code interpreter is actually the reference RS274NGC interpreter, originally developed at NIST. There is stil

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[HermanAB]

Yes, and your post should link directly to your own webserver running on a 1MHz PIC processor...

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[AntiGenX]

Yes, and your post should link directly to your own webserver running on a 1MHz PIC processor...

With a 1kW PSU of course...

Re:Sweeeeeeet....

[Skuld-Chan]

You might want to watch out actually. I've found stock that pc power supplies have way to much ac line ripple on the dc outputs. This is something you can see easily on any scope on even the very best pc power supplies.

1kW

[ndansmith]

"How else are you supposed to power your USB tanning lamp?"

~DOCSANE

Definitely unnecessary

[chrome]

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.

Re:Definitely unnecessary

[wik]

Not quite 30 drive bays, but big cases with many drive bays do exist: Sun E450 [sun.com].

Re:Definitely unnecessary

[bofkentucky]

and you can get tha bastards for cheap these days, $7000 out the door with a qfe and 20 36 giggers from most gray market vendors. They're loud and chew a ton of power but if you buy a empty 450 chassis for 2K and a pile of 146GB scsi drives (425/per on pricewatch), you're looking at a > 2.5TB raid 5 array plus a box powerfull enough to still run just about any site out on the net, all for ~6000. Slap in a couple of QFE's and compile samba and you have a monster file server for your users on the cheap.

Re:Definitely unnecessary

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Do we need 1KW PSUs? no. I don't think so.

Generally, when I buy an overpowered PS, it's because I need a particular amp capacity on one of the rails. So I need a 550W PS for an Athlon 1.4Ghz box that probably draws 200W. This was because only the 550W model had the proper rating for +5DC.

Re:Definitely unnecessary

[chrome]

Well, maybe.

The guy isn't having any problems *shrug*. I guess we'll know if it explodes! :)

Re:You are wrong... This is why

[scheme]

Interesting - you'd think that in situations like this, the BIOS could mediate the startup process such that everything wasn't hammering the PSU all at once. I wondered if this is what was happening on occasion, since my CPU would start up, but the drive would power up a few seconds afterward.

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

"Who will actually have a need for this ..."

[YrWrstNtmr]

They said the same about the 386 chip when it was new.

"Good for servers, but no one needs this much CPU power in the home."

IT power usage

[wwwillem]

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.

Re:IT power usage

[photon317]

Where I work, the monthly power bill for the datacenter (power to machines, disk arrays, battery systems, and cooling for the room) is around $30,000. And I know I've seen bigger datacenters - we're just yet another technology-reliant company among thousands upon thousands of others.

You better hope not

[overshoot]

Did you know that by now 10% of current electricity usage in the US is needed for computers?

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.

Re:IT power usage

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

Oh, ENOUGH already. 1kW is a joke.

[xtal]

Enough with the people who don't get scale, ok?

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

Re:IT power usage

[ucblockhead]

According to this [doe.gov], computers and peripherals used 21 billion kWh in 2001, out of a total of 1,140 billion kWh in the US. which means that residential computer use is 1.8% of the total. Probably gone up a bit since then, but I doubt to 10%.

If you include all electronics (including TVs and stereos, etc.) it reaches about 10%.

Not that unreasonable for an SLI Machine

[Anonymous Coward]

According to http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Preview s/G70preview/11.html [neoseeker.com], 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.

Niche product

[Sv-Manowar]

I'm sure theres a market out there somewhere for this, and those people will graciously recieve this product as exactly what they've been looking for. However I'm more interested in smaller, quieter PC's as the next evolutionary step. Given the processing power of today's PC's, the need to keep pushing hardware to obtain that last piece of performance has been removed, and its more beneficial to see if the computer can run more slightly more slowly but with very little noise.

Great!

[hungrygrue]

I can finally build my Linux powered Arch Welder case mod!

Rediculous!

[Billly Gates]

What does a powerpc G4 use? 25 watts? I think?

This is insane and something is fishy if x86 hardware is this demanding.

Are the components filled with gobs of transistors and poor quality capacitators which use more power?

To me anything over 300 watts should not exist for a pc. After all the new PS3 which is about as powerfull as a pc if not more uses what? 90 watts?

What about Octal dual-core opteron servers?

[tcc]

check this baby out for example:

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.html [tyan.com]

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 :) )

Redundancy or Energy Efficiency

[overshoot]

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?

No, we should concentrate on what matters: Actively-cooled Nomex loungewear with IV hydration systems to keep users from dying of heat exhaustion. (The noise-canceling headphones are already available.)

In case you wondered, it's too late: I already filed a patent application for sensing devices coupled into ACPI to t

Take advantage of cheap energy

[dada21]

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.

Appropriate Name

[Comatose51]

And by "Galaxy" they mean that every hour it draws enough power to require the consumption of a micro-galaxy, like the kind you find in a marble from the first Men in Black. Everytime you power on your system it is "As if a million souls cried out in torment..." The Jedis are going to be mad about this one.

overkill is good

[v1]

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.

Naw...

[Slipped_Disk]

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.

Re:Naw...

[stox]

Try a Sun 4/280. 1.2KW just for the chassis, another 1.2KW for a pair of 660MB SMD platters.

Two words

[NitsujTPU]

Rail gun.

Uses for 1kw?

[Junior J. Junior III]

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...

It will sell

[teknokracy]

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 I need this

[BCW2]

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.

Orion Multisystems could use this power supply

[diz]

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).

Rating != Consumption, justification for PS

[Ikkyu]

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

Re:Rating != Consumption, justification for PS

[DaCool42]

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.

1 kilowatt? Bah...

[Goonie]

When you're Strategic Air Command and you're defending against the commies, you need three megawatts [wikipedia.org] to power your computers :)

Two Words...

[Svartalf]

...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...).

Re:Time to act like responsible people....

[wwwillem]

I 100% agree with you!! But then we are overestimating the intelligence of people going on a Saturday afternoon to Best Buy to get a nice new bloated Windows loaded Dell or HP. Bigger is better .....

Re:"Mains power" ?

[slim]

"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".

Re:It can supply a kW, but ...

[Big_Breaker]

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.