Powersupply big enough?

[scooterscot]

It seems clear that the watts burnt by the graphics cards today are probably 95% spent on heat while the remaining 5% is used to change the picture you see on the screen!

[lilelvis2000]

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6440737610.html

But I don't think I could fit in my office.

[DiscoStu]

A slightly old example, but stretching a 200W power supply really isn't difficult...

[scooterscot]

I thought this was the way to go but on second thoughts the voltage drops down to ~12v so therefore theres plenty of scope for the PSU to increase the wattage. 200W wouldn't even power my HD's nvm CPU, Ghaphics etc.

Every heard of a laptop using 200 watts? Yet delivering near the same quality as a desktop machine.

With energy consumption increasing hardware designers have an opportunity to consider power requirements in the technology they develop. CMOS parts are widely available, more expensive yes, but as long as business demands cheaper equipment you'll have people plugging in power hungry peripherals.

It really is an unfortunate situations and if the government were serious about reducing power consumption I think this would be a good area to start.

Look you can do your washing on 200w yet cannot run a PC?!!! 200w would not run my hard drive, cheese louise

[Bomber]

If you had an in line power meter with the mains I would bet the PC does not go near 200-Watts. I don't know where the idea comes from that PC's are power hungry. The maximum power required by my imac is 200w and don't forget that includes the monitor.

I suspect your failures are the result of software/hardware incompatibilities, clock times between boards. I've encountered system crashes in the past just because an IDE cable was longer than necessary, this error only occurred after software update albeit.

I thought this was the way to go but on second thoughts the voltage drops down to ~12v so therefore theres plenty of scope for the PSU to increase the wattage. 200W wouldn't even power my HD's nvm CPU, Ghaphics etc.

[scooterscot]

If you had an in line power meter with the mains I would bet the PC does not go near 200-Watts. I don't know where the idea comes from that PC's are power hungry. The maximum power required by my imac is 200w and don't forget that includes the monitor.

I suspect your failures are the result of software/hardware incompatibilities, clock times between boards. I've encountered system crashes in the past just because an IDE cable was longer than necessary, this error only occurred after software update albeit.

[lilelvis2000]

Well that didn't fix the problem. In fact I managed to crash the OS twice today. I've put my RAID in the side burner for now..I'm using a CRON job to copy the data from one drive to the other overnight.

I think there is either a problem with my install (corrupt CD) or some other serious hardware issue. Crap SATA card, crap memory.

Will need to find time to test those someday...

[meridian]

Tagan tg480 u22

I've got one in my main machine, it's whisper quiet and supports dual PCIe graphics cards.

[lilelvis2000]

I've ordered a Antec EarthWatts 380W PSU...off Amazon £32.50 total...not bad. Apparently its 80% effecient.

Think about a new MB next. What I really need to do is upgrade the BIOS so the USb ports work with the KVM properly.

[~Craig~]

Stick a 400W PSU in there and it will probably be ok. I would however steer away from the the very cheap PSU's as they tend to be noisy and carp quality.

Go for an Antec or Hi-Power.

[lilelvis2000]

Who knew.

I look at each component which rates their draw in amperage. And since I can't be bothered to add each one up...I never was good at spreadsheets.

For £140 I can get a dual-core bare bones system W/ 1Gig RAM & 400W PSU. I am debating whether I should stick with my current MB and PSU.

[KevinS]

The usual disclaimer applies if replacing it with a higher rated one makes no difference to the problems you're having

And if it doesn't fix the problem and you upgraded the motherboard/cpu/ram, you would have needed the uprated PSU anyway...

[DiscoStu]

To follow up on my very brief previous post, in a previous life a long time ago I did tech support for PC World. We'd frequently get phone calls from people with budget machines who'd put in an extra CD drive / HDD / added a graphics card to replace the onboard one whose machines were freezing / blue-screening / doing other weird things.

Usually the problem was an over-stretched PSU. Most were rated as close to the wattage that the OEM components would draw as possible to keep costs down, so as soon as something new was added it would struggle to cope.

The usual disclaimer applies if replacing it with a higher rated one makes no difference to the problems you're having

[DiscoStu]

I have a old box which is a Celeron 800Mhz, w/ 768MB RAM
and 1 11Gig IDE disk, CD-RW, 2 320G WD SATA drives. Plus it
has a PCI NIC, PCI ATI card, PCI SATA card.
It is currently running FreeBSD 7.0 and the two SATA drives are combined as a RAID 1.

Been having some (well lots) of problems with the mirror. It keeps breaking. One of the devices keeps falling over whenever I need to copy, move, extract large files on it. By large I mean 2Gig files.

I then have to rebuild the mirror..which is interesting to say the least.

As this has been happening quite regularly, someone mentioned that perhaps there isn't enough power..or the powersupply is flaky. It is an old machine I got from a charity shop for £30.

It currently has a seasonic 235W power supply. which I reckon should be enough. Is it enough?

The MB is none too happy with my KVM either so just wondering if I should junk the MB and PS and get new ones.

235W? It's not enough.

[lilelvis2000]

I have a old box which is a Celeron 800Mhz, w/ 768MB RAM
and 1 11Gig IDE disk, CD-RW, 2 320G WD SATA drives. Plus it
has a PCI NIC, PCI ATI card, PCI SATA card.
It is currently running FreeBSD 7.0 and the two SATA drives are combined as a RAID 1.

Been having some (well lots) of problems with the mirror. It keeps breaking. One of the devices keeps falling over whenever I need to copy, move, extract large files on it. By large I mean 2Gig files.

I then have to rebuild the mirror..which is interesting to say the least.

As this has been happening quite regularly, someone mentioned that perhaps there isn't enough power..or the powersupply is flaky. It is an old machine I got from a charity shop for £30.

It currently has a seasonic 235W power supply. which I reckon should be enough. Is it enough?

The MB is none too happy with my KVM either so just wondering if I should junk the MB and PS and get new ones.