PC Power and Cooling 400 W Power Supply NOT ENOUGH 12v
 

PC Power and Cooling Silencer 400 W ATX / ATX12V Power Supply
that psu is nice... but only 15A on the 12v... there any power supplies by them that is higher on the 12v? or any as good as that but with more 12v?
i plan on running some neons of it along with a bunch of drives

Get them to customise you one with 20A on the 12v line then.

Or look at the Antec, and Sparkle psu's

In their Turbo-Cool series (not the silencer series) the 450ATX has 18A on the 12V line ( it's what I use :D ) It's $15 more than the Silencer 400.

Why neons? Have you read anything about cold cathodes? They're brighter, cheaper, smaller, run colder, and use alot less power than neons. They're all around just much better. They come in all the colors Neon comes in.. The only down side they have is their size, they're really small, and they break easily.. But at like $5 a tube, it's not a big deal usually. :) 4 of them would make your case so bright you could light your room with it. And with a 15a 12v, you could probably run about 150 of them.. ;)

well for one i already have the neons and second they are much cheaper

$5 tubes for the cathodes!!!!!!????? where!
i have seen them for not much cheaper than $40, but thats not including the power unit, which isnt more than $15

Look around on allelectronics.com, I KNOW I saw the power units for $5 there, and I think the bulbs were about the same price, maybe $8.. But hey, if you already have the neons, sell 'em on Ebay.. ;) hehehe..

if he is running heaps of drives he'll still need a strong 12v regardless...

hrm... well i will have to calculate out everything.. and see what i come up with... i just wanna have a psu that is gonna last me several years

what about supermicro? their 400w has 3 seperate pots for 3.3v, 5v, 12v, and it has 25a on the 12v

hrmmm well if its a 400W with alot of the wattage goin to the 25a 12v then im gonna need a much higher wattage


i think im just gonna go for the 450 PCP&C, and ditch the neons for cold cathodes and that should be good..

how do i figure out the pull from my MOBO w/proc???

You can just call PC Power & Cooling and let them know what's in your box. I recently replaced my second Enermax 651 with a Turbo Cool 450. I could not be happier.

trust me, I'm sure the supermicro will do it. It's designed for twin processor servers with scsi hdds. The pcp&c will definately do it as well

If you didn't notice, the ppc&c p/s units have a 5 year warranty ( and from my experience you won't make use of it ;)

The last week I've been using one of my Turbo-Cool 450s to run some testing on a new m/b, cpu, memory combo and have been from relatively low load (50% of max FSB/core speed) up to max stable speeds using a variety of test and bench software. During the entire course of the testing NONE of the supply voltages have varied by more than 30mV and the +5V and +3.3V haven't varied by more than 10mV going from idle to max load :D

Power calculation wise, for everything you have you should be able to get typical, max, and surge power requirement ratings. As a starting point, AMD recommends 210W combined on 3.3 & 5V rails for a typical XP system as I remember(this for memory, CPU, m/b). The Turbo-Cool 450 has a 300W rating combined for the 3.3V & 5V rails. You should have NO problem with a fully loaded system there.

You can get the power requirements for most any hard drive (or add-in card for that matter) directly off the manufacturer's web pages. Be sure to use the SEEK power (when the drive is actually moving the heads, not when it is sitting idle). Another starting point: large 10K SCSI drives run in the 1A to 1.5A range for active seek power requirements and in the 2A to 2.5A range during initial power for spin up of the platters (surge power rating).

10mv? DAMN, thats nice ;) What is the system you were running?

The one I referenced is a semi-stripped down system I'm using to do look see at a m/b and memory with.

A7V266-E
XP1800+ (unlocked)
512MB (brand witheld) PC2700 DDR
Hercules Prophet GF2 GTS 64MB
3Com 905C 10/100 Nic
A pair of Baracuda IVs
Toshiba SM1612 DVD drive


In the course of sorting out the memory and m/b I've done testing at everything from 1200 to 1750Mhz CPU core speeds and 100 to 165Mhz FSB speeds, and VCore settings to 1.85V, runs of Prime95, Memtest86, DocMem, 3dMark2000, Sandra, and some custom test software. The +5V rail has only changed -10mV during any of the testing. The +3.3V rail has only has moved +/- 10mV. The +12V rail has fluctuated the most, MBM5 recorded a couple of times it moving 30mV.

Once I get the core components sorted out and the testing done, then I may end up moving my SCSI drives and other toys over to it ;)

yeah thats really good then, if it can do that much of a change.

why is your ram 'brand withheld'?

The ram is what I'm currently in the process of doing the testing on. As a matter of ethics, until the testing is done, the results sorted out, and discussed with the vendor I chose not to disclose the vendor ;)

No he still has plenty of power for a few hard drives, a couple optical drives, and more...

emc, so it is crucial?

* refuses to play the multiple guess process of elimination game *

:D

I was only going to guess crucial because they told me via email that pc2700 samples are around, and they will release it soon