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Power Hardware

A Kilowatt of Power 336

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the but-she-said-the-old-one-was-a-nice-size dept.
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.'"
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A Kilowatt of Power More

A Kilowatt of Power

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  • Pfffft (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) * on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:34AM (#14350669)
    'In the current computing world, where more always equals "better than" the 1KW is king.'"

    1KW? Pfffft, and you think thats Ub3r 133t? Check out my super-duper(tm) Cisco Systems 4200 WACV [shopping.com] 4.2KW powerhouse. This baby whoups any powersupply anyday, anywheres, anytime.

    • Re:Pfffft (Score:3, Interesting)

      by moro_666 ( 414422 )
      1KW, 4KW .... you can heat a room up with 1KW and heat a whole house with 4KW.

      concidering the fact that we have -15 degrees by celsius outside right here, i prefer the heater.

      • Re:Pfffft (Score:2, Informative)

        by dancallaghan ( 890674 )
        But surely all (or nearly all?) 4200 watts are eventually converted to waste heat. So you could have a heater *and* a sh#tload of PoE gear.
        • a pretty percentage of it will be turned into moving air and to light emission too, also to spin hdd's. but i agree, most of it will turn out as heat in the end (energy can't just dissapear into the machine, if it would, einstein would start to turn in his grave :)

          • Re:Pfffft (Score:5, Insightful)

            by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @06:01AM (#14350882)

            a pretty percentage of it will be turned into moving air and to light emission too, also to spin hdd's. but i agree, most of it will turn out as heat in the end

            All of it will turn to heat in the end. Moving air will stop due to friction, as its kinetic energy turns to heat, and light is absorbed to walls and your eyes, warming them up.

            All energy turns to heat in the end, some units of it just take a longer road than others.

            • All energy turns to heat in the end, some units of it just take a longer road than others.


              Although *MOST* turns to heat, you also forgot light and deformation as energy sinks as well.

            • Re:Pfffft (Score:3, Funny)

              by necro81 ( 917438 )
              I for one would like to thank all of the PSU enthusiasts for increasing the entropy of the universe, one KW-hr at a time...
      • 1KW, 4KW .... you can heat a room up with 1KW and heat a whole house with 4KW

        You must have a small house or a super tight house. My heat has 3 5KW elements. I had a breaker trip dropping 2 elements. 5KW was not enough to keep a 2 story 4 bedroom home warm.

    • Re:Pfffft (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      On the other side, there's my fanless mini-itx system, just 533 MHz, but enough to run X and FVWM, mutt, and all the other tools I need in my daily life (work AND private use). And that at a mere 15 watts, no moving parts except the HD. In germany, 1 kWh costs about $0.23, I save about $660 every year (8 hours/day) compared to 1KW...

  • Overkill? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) * on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:36AM (#14350671)
    > was not afraid to admit how much of an overkill it is for the enthusiast market.

    Nothing is overkill for a true enthusiast.

    (You should see my friend's stereo speakers.)

  • That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:40AM (#14350680) Homepage
    I've got a 1.21 Jigawatt power supply. Powered by some plutonium I stole from some terrorists in a VW bus down at the twin pines mall.

    • Re:That's nothing... (Score:4, Funny)

      by nurhussein ( 864532 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:54AM (#14350717) Homepage
      That was pretty dangerous. All you needed was to purchase 1,210 of these PC Power and Cooling 1KW units, and stack 'em on your DeLorean.

      Either that or a bolt of lightning.
      • That was pretty dangerous. All you needed was to purchase 1,210 of these PC Power and Cooling 1KW units, and stack 'em on your DeLorean.

        Yeah, well, it's not like they're going to come chasing after me with their AK-47s, immediately after I perform my proof-of-concept experiment where I send my dog 12 miunutes into the future, forcing a dramatic, hair-raising flight by my friend who's videotaping the whole thing for posterity, ending in an accidental trip back in time which results in a near-catastrophi
      • That'd be 1,210,000 of the 1kW units stacked on your DeLorean. Yeah, beowolf cluster and whatnot.

  • No one cares! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by John Nowak ( 872479 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:41AM (#14350684)
    I thought this was Slashdot, not GHZWATTMBCIRCLEJERK.

  • King? (Score:4, Funny)

    by rookworm ( 822550 ) <horace7945@@@yahoo...ca> on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:43AM (#14350687)
    1KW is king

    You obviously have not seen my flux capacitor

  • Buh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Phariom ( 941580 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:44AM (#14350689)
    "In the quest for maximum PC performance, you cannot have too much of a good thing. The enthusiasts have shown us that two video cards are better than one, as are two hard drives, and faster is always better."

    Preposterous!

    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.

    • Re:Buh? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:01AM (#14350737)
      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!

  • Finally.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:45AM (#14350695) Journal
    A PSU that can run two high end computers. Its funny but very intresting if it can do this without a problem.
  • I love powerful PCs/workstation (drools over Dual-Core Dual HP XW9300).
    But I also hate the noise of powerful PCs.
    This freakshow of a power-supply is IMO useless in any real-world scenario (except for maybe being a good bad example), in addition to setting a silly precedent for non-intelligent and downright wasteful use of resources.
    People should get used to the fact that soon they won't be able to afford the power-consumption of such a beast anymore.

    • This freakshow of a power-supply is IMO useless in any real-world scenario

      Unless, that is if you have your own server rack in your basement. THEN it does come in handy. But you are correct, this kind of thing is definitally overkill for even the totally suped-up computers

    • You berate this "freakshow of a power supply" while ranting about your need for a whisper quiet computer.

      Duuuuuuhhhh.

      If a power supply can crank a kilowatt without breaking too much of a sweat, what do you think it's going to do when running at a fourth of that? The cooling fan can run cooler and all those mambo heatsinks will help carry the heat out of the back of the case - as opposed to teeny heatsinks in a "less wasteful" powersupply that barely even get the heat away from the fets doing the power conve

  • Just imagine.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by sniepre ( 517796 ) <sniepre@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @04:52AM (#14350712) Homepage
    Just imagine how many neon lights and LEDs you could power in your modded case with that thing! It'd be like the sun!

    Everyone knows, for every sticker or light-effect you add to your case, it's an honorary +50Mhz boost!
  • We get a 1.21 gigawatt power supply.

  • okay Lets start counting. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JollyFinn ( 267972 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:08AM (#14350758)
    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.
    • it might be overkill but its most certainly the fastest system, for everyday linux desktop usage

      Might be overkill? That system has serious grunt power; there's no way it's warranted for "everyday... desktop usage" unless your idea of "desktop usage" is serious number crunching. Scientific work, rendering, large scale video editing, yes; "desktop usage", absolutely not.
      • Might be overkill? That system has serious grunt power; there's no way it's warranted for "everyday... desktop usage" unless your idea of "desktop usage" is serious number crunching. Scientific work, rendering, large scale video editing, yes; "desktop usage", absolutely not.

        Yeah, but think how fast Google's homepage will load!

    • With power that big, we could go back to the days of plugging our monitor into the PC's power supply, right? I kinda miss those days. It was easy to just attach the monitor's power supply cable to the video cable with some zip ties and have everything tidy. Now that I have a dual display system and lots of USB hoopla, every cable that can be kept tidy helps.

  • Finally! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Belseth ( 835595 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:15AM (#14350780)
    I've been wanting to overclock my 4800 dual core to 19200. This should be a big help. The liquid Helium is a bit hard to work with but worth it.
  • And i don't mean overkill like in a piece of hardware too expensive for what it delivers: this is literally overkill, as a regular desktop PC will never ever approach that kind of power consumption. More does not always equals to "better than" - you could power three computers with that thing! It seems to be a quality product though, but $500 is too much to spend in something you don't need and probably never will.

    If you really need that kind of power, you don't have a "regular" PC, and the
    • > And i don't mean overkill like in a piece of hardware too expensive for what it delivers: this is literally overkill, as a regular desktop PC will never ever approach that kind of power consumption

      Just like how a home user will never use 100 gigs of storage, right?

    • a regular desktop PC will never ever approach that kind of power consumption


      Never is a rather big statement. Just like "a regular desktop PC will never ever need more than a 10MB hard drive", or "a regular desktop PC will never ever need more than 640KB of RAM".

  • Who needs that? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bombshelter13 ( 786671 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:25AM (#14350800)
    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?

  • how about a good power supply instead? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wansu ( 846 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:30AM (#14350811)


    Most computer power supplies are crap. In the race to the bottom to get the lowest cost, quality and performance were the casualties. In previous power supply roundups and shootouts, a number of products didn't deliver rated faceplate performance. Some smoked. Forget thousand watt power supplies. Most general purpose computers need a reliable power supply that meets it's published specs at 350 watts.

    • Well... there's a lot of room to fudge, and like so man other people have said, it's about amperage. Just about a week ago, I showed a coworker a couple of power supplies, one rated at 400 watts, the other at 425 watts. As I recall, the 400-watt power supply (which was quite expensive) could deliver upwards of 30 amps on the +12V line, where the 425-watt unit maxed out at 18.

      Even assuming that both of those supplies reached their published specs, if he's trying to run a high-draw, overclocked CPU and a hi

    • Re:how about a good power supply instead? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @05:54AM (#14350864) Homepage Journal
      In my experience, PC Power & Cooling tend to make high-quality products.

      This review, however, is crap. If someone is writing about a PSU and can't bother to include whether it's UL listed or not in SIX PAGES of text, their site is a joke.

      UL listing is one of the most important things to look for in a PSU, yet almost none of them have it, and few if any review websites seem to care. If there's one thing in my computer that I want to be over-engineered for safety, it's the part that plugs into the wall socket.

      This one *is*, but I had to go to the manufacturer's website to find that out.

  •     I have a machine that draws upwards of 700 watts. But, that machine has 4 processers, 10 disks, and a few more goodies on it. And it doesn't use just one power supply, but three redundant supplies!

    steve

  • Talk about missing the point! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:11AM (#14351021) Homepage
    1kW is a joke. Wake me up when they announce that a computer with at least as much processing power as today's top of the line runs on 1mW of power (yes, one MILLIwatt). Boasting about 1kW is like boasting that your car gets 1mile to the gallon.
  • Its always confused me slightly and its coming back to bite me on the ass since I now need to build a dual core SLI system (A-4800) with EIGHT hard drives. Given that SLI systems are often advised to have a 480W PSU minimum Im not quite sure a 650W even is going to be sufficient. Any pointers for an ignoramous while were on the topic of PSUs....am I actually a potential customer for one of these?
    • Well, professionals (and others) have been known to use an arcane mathematical system called addition [math.com] .

      Equipment:
      Brain and / or calculator.

      Method:
      Visit the manufacturers homepage for each item you want to build into your system, find the technical specifications for that item, then find the specification for the maximum power draw for that item.

      Write that figure down, then repeat the process for each of the other system components. When you have data for all the devices, add them together to produce a to

  • Computers are powerhogs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @07:19AM (#14351040) Homepage
    I think it's time to make computers less power-hungry. I have a 1300 MHz Duron with an nVidia geForce 5700 and two harddisks. That thing uses 145 W when it's doing nothing, and that is without the monitor. I use less power to light all the rooms in my, admittedly small, house! Even my big wide-screen CRT TV doesn't use that much power when it's on. I can't believe we can't do better. With better, I mean make computers that use less power.
  • Most people can get by with a 250 watt power supply these days. A hard drive takes around 25 watts to spin up but after that it cruises along pulling only 4 to 6. Check this out.. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000353.h tml [codinghorror.com]

    Find some other way to compensate for your lack of whatever instead of burning more energy just because it's "bigger-than-yours".

  • What about Apple? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by h0mer ( 181006 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @08:53AM (#14351240)
    I'm surprised no one has mentioned that some of the newest dual-core Power Mac G5s run a 1 kW power supply STOCK. I thought it was insane when I first found out about it.

  • 1kW (Score:3, Informative)

    by gauntlet420 ( 646001 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @09:17AM (#14351290) Journal

    I seem to remember the same arguments from a few months back:

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/ 22/2157244&tid=232&tid=126 [slashdot.org]

    And, since IAAPSD (I am a power supply designer), the same observations are applicable:

    • - a 1 kW PSU and a 400W PSU will deliver equal amounts of power into a conventional system that only needs 250W - specifically, 250W
    • - most commercial-grade PSUs are unlikely to survive long-term at their maximum rated power - that is to say, that 300W power supply that you bought for $10 from your local PC junk discount store is not the best thing to power your dual-core uber-gaming rig
    • - most commercial-grade PSUs do have an efficiency sweet-spot because they do not use things like input power factor correction and are not engineered to exceed their requirements (i.e. ATX specifications) by even a fraction (to keep costs to a minimum)
    • - a high-power PSU running at light load can be expected to last much longer than a lower-rated PSU at the same load as the component stress levels are lower - that is to say, the components in the 1 kW PSU are stronger than those in a 400W PSU, and industry standards dictate compoment stress levels to not exceed 50-70% of maximum (depending on the type of part) to ensure long MTBF (mean time between failures)
    • - all power supplies fail eventually - if well-designed, the only things that will wear out are the electrolytic capacitors, which will eventually dry out (over a period of years) and cause the PSU to degrade and eventually quit

  • Inverted thinking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2005 @01:37PM (#14352758) Homepage
    A 1KW power supply is not king, it's the worst possible example of waste and the most ineligant solution.

    A computer system that can perform at currently accepted levels and needs less power is king. Show me an AMD64-class CPU running at 3GHz with a terabyte of storage operating at 100W or less and I'll be impressed. It takes no magic to throw more hardware/power at a design - that's just brute force.

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