950W Power Supply Units Sneak into Market

@ 2004/11/28
A Japan-based company has started to sell its power supply units with maximum output of up to 950W, which is the world’s highest performance for desktops. As modern central processing units and graphics cards continue to devour more and more power, high-end personal computer’s PSU requirements will continue to increase and such PSUs are likely to gain popularity.


SNE, a Japanese maker of various hardware aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers, recently started to sell its 950W, 900W and 850W power supply units, claiming the world’s record PSUs. The devices, however, can draw peak wattage only in extreme cases. In typical cases the power of the PSUs is 750W, 700W and 650W respectively, which is still among the world’s top power supply units.

PSUs from SNE can power typical ATX as well as EPS12V systems, which means that the devices can be used for both desktop and workstation/server computers. The power supplies are equipped with 5 connectors for Serial ATA, 4 connectors for mini-Molex and 4 connectors for Molex plugs. The top, 950W (model FSRP950LGA), PSU can draw 34A on 3.3V and 5V connectors and from 14A to 18A on various 12V connectors, which is not higher compared to top offerings from companies like Antec. This may mean that the PSUs from SNE are designed for server and workstation platforms that require extreme wattage to feed multiple hard disk drives and microprocessors, rather than ability draw extreme current on high-speed components, such as top graphics cards or latest processors.

High-end system components, such as Advanced Micro Devices’s Athlon 64 FX-55 chip, or Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz chip, require extremely powerful power supplies, as they consume more than 100W of power in peak cases, and also tend to need for very high current of about 80A (in case of AMD Athlon 64 FX-55), which not many contemporary mainboards and power supply units can provide.

Modern graphics cards also consume of about 80W in peak cases, X-bit labs has learnt. Furthermore, NVIDIA Corp. recently said that those who plan to install a couple of GeForce 6800 GT or GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards into a single computer to get extreme speed should also acquire 550W – 600W PSUs, as typically high-end graphics sub-systems collaborate with top graphics processors in ultra-expensive PCs.

SNE’s 950W, 900W and 850W power supply units cost about $570, $475 and $427 in Tokyo, Japan, Akiba PC Hotline web-site notes.

Comment from kristos @ 2004/11/28
he meant 4 ram sticks (or 3 for that matter), not necesseraly 2 gig
Comment from TeuS @ 2004/11/28
Quote:
Originally posted by koensa
i bet person thats has a fx57@3.3 has a raid array...

nor would he have 2 gig
what's the matter with 2GB of RAM?
except that there's a bigger chance that one single chip on your memory lowers the overall max speed of the memory

I don't see the problem of a RAID setup either. even if the PCI bus isn't locked, just use a 66mhz PCI RAID card

Quote:
Originally posted by koensa
but when u overclock and do benchmarks, u really really dont want to have much data, cuz having much data makes your comp slow.

ever went to a LAN with your fresformatted system and returend with all full drives and noticing how slow he became?
lol. that's just windows that slows down because you install 101 apps. if you have a 400GB large HDD, it really doesn't make a difference if 1% or 95% of the HDD is being used

Quote:
Originally posted by kristos
does it matter if you have a lot of data on a hdd, separate from the hdd your os is on?
if the OS is on partition1, it doesn't have any business with the data on partition2. neither does it have any business with everything under partition1\leech as long as you don't execute it

Comment from jmke @ 2004/11/28
not a single thing imho
I've seen file servers with 4500GB (yes) run quite fluently
Comment from kristos @ 2004/11/28
does it matter if you have a lot of data on a hdd, separate from the hdd your os is on?
Comment from jmke @ 2004/11/28
Quote:
Originally posted by koensa

ever went to a LAN with your fresformatted system and returend with all full drives and noticing how slow he became?
no. solution is called defrag

don't see why RAID would be dangerous, if anything, it increases data redundancy, unless you are using RAID0, which I advise against using for anything else but a scratch disk for paging file.

Comment from kristos @ 2004/11/28
why no raid?

I'm only asking.

I know you don't NEED raid for overclocking but if you do anything else with that compu, raid is a very nice feature.

I only installed raid once and it took forever to install windows xp but boot time was amazingly fast

If that's normal for raid (the slow installation) then I can understand, but a friend of mine who does it quite frequently was so hyped about how fast win xp installed on a raid array, that it can't be that bad.

besides, afaik, your less likely to get data corruption with a (decent?) raid card if you don't' have an pci/agp lock.
Comment from jmke @ 2004/11/28
come again Koensa?
Comment from piotke @ 2004/11/28
2 * 6800 GT ultra XT PE ² in sli
FX55 heavely overclocked, lets's say 3.4 ghz
Couple of hdd's + raid 26+54 controller
2 Gb of pc5864,5 DDr

aha, and not a single psu can supply that on a decent way.
Comment from DyNaRaX @ 2004/11/28
what's next? pc's on 380V instead of 230V?