Antec TruePower Trio 550
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Looks like Seasonic's excellent designs are winning contracts with various manufacturers. First Corsair, then Antec. Maybe this is a nod to the increasing popularity of truly quiet computing, as opposed to just marketing hype focused on silence? I see a good trend.
Shame on the sub-par fan controller, though.
Shame on the sub-par fan controller, though.
I don't know which revision of the PSU did SPCR review, but here is my experience: I bought a Trio 650, two months ago, as a birthday present for a friend of mine. The unit was defective, I was told by the service people that the 12V fluctuated wildly. The replacement also has some 12V fluctuation, but not as bad. My friend had to drop his overclock that he had stable with a 360W Chieftec. I'd like to know which capacitors were used to manufacture the Trio 650, as capacitor quality (I bet lower than a S12-E+650) is a likely source of problems. Maybe Antec and Seasonic will get it right, but IMO people should be aware that the first batch of Trio's is a gamble.
PS: in the meantime the Corsair 520 became available in my city - priced between the Trio 550 and 650 (if I could have waited, I would have bought it instead).
PS: in the meantime the Corsair 520 became available in my city - priced between the Trio 550 and 650 (if I could have waited, I would have bought it instead).
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Hi MikeC,
out of curiosity: the 650W version of the Trio reviewed by a finnish website had a plastic sheet covering half of the PSU fan. Did your 650W sample have this (see the link below for picture)?
http://www.tehomylly.net/artikkelit/kuv ... 650_04.jpg
out of curiosity: the 650W version of the Trio reviewed by a finnish website had a plastic sheet covering half of the PSU fan. Did your 650W sample have this (see the link below for picture)?
http://www.tehomylly.net/artikkelit/kuv ... 650_04.jpg
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Actually, yes.Aleksi wrote:Hi MikeC,
out of curiosity: the 650W version of the Trio reviewed by a finnish website had a plastic sheet covering half of the PSU fan. Did your 650W sample have this (see the link below for picture)?
http://www.tehomylly.net/artikkelit/kuv ... 650_04.jpg
It means they're trying to ensure the air goes over the components in the output side of the PSU. It also means the 650 will probably be a touch louder at idle and get louder faster as soon as the fan starts to speed up, due to the unavoidable turbulence.
Perhaps Kelly can have a look at the 650's behavior at a later time.
So mike is the S12 430W still a good recommendation today? Will you be looking at a new revision of it soon?
http://www.seasonic.com/new/twevent20060505.htm
http://www.seasonic.com/new/twevent20060505.htm
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Can anyone tell me the maximum amperage of the 12 volt lines for the Antec Trio 650? The sticker for the Trio 550 lists a maximum of 42 amps for the combined 12 volt lines but the sticker for the Trio 650 isnt shown and I cant find the info on Antec's web site. I have a media server with 15 hard drives (yes that's 15 hard drives) and I think the Seasonic S12 600 PSU I'm using right now with its limit of 36 amps isnt powerul enough to power all these drives at least when initially starting up. I was thinking of replacing it with the Trio 650. Replacing the hard drives (ten 250 gig hard drives in two RAID 5 arrays, two 300 gig drives in RAID 0 and two 500 gig drives) with larger and fewer ones isnt an option right now.
Have you actually had any unexpected shutdowns or other protection circuit shutdowns of the PSU? ie any actual incidents to make you think the S12-600 is not up to it.I think the Seasonic S12 600 PSU I'm using right now with its limit of 36 amps isnt powerful enough to power all these drives at least when initially starting up.
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I've had not one but two hard drives fail in the media server at the same time. One was a 60 gb Maxtor ATA being used as the system drive and the other was a Western Digital 500 gb SATA drive (WD5000KS). Both drives were new and hadn't been used and I had had the media server running for only a few months. Before they died I started getting a ticking sound during startup from the Maxtor that got more and more frequent. And if I shut down the system and then turned off power to the media server via the PSU switch and then turned power back on via the PSU switch and tried to bootup the media server the ticking always happened.
If I could get it to boot without ticking I usually didnt have a problem. The SMART data from the Maxtor didn't show any problems. The WD drive sometimes wouldnt show in the BIOS POST screen when booting. It too didnt show any errors via SMART until it stopped reporting SMART data at all. I'm using Speedfan 4.28 to read SMART data. The two drives are in a 3-in-2-enclosure which has a 80mm fan in front of it and Speedfan never showed any heat problems. I've read this kind of flaky behavior can be caused by a underpowered PSU.
With 15 drives, 9 fans (seven 80mm, two 120mm) plus 2.6 ghz P4 CPU, ECS 848P motherboard and 1 gig of memory the PSU might be underpowered.
If I could get it to boot without ticking I usually didnt have a problem. The SMART data from the Maxtor didn't show any problems. The WD drive sometimes wouldnt show in the BIOS POST screen when booting. It too didnt show any errors via SMART until it stopped reporting SMART data at all. I'm using Speedfan 4.28 to read SMART data. The two drives are in a 3-in-2-enclosure which has a 80mm fan in front of it and Speedfan never showed any heat problems. I've read this kind of flaky behavior can be caused by a underpowered PSU.
With 15 drives, 9 fans (seven 80mm, two 120mm) plus 2.6 ghz P4 CPU, ECS 848P motherboard and 1 gig of memory the PSU might be underpowered.
Last edited by mindwalker on Tue Jan 30, 2007 1:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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May I suggest finding a motherboard with staggered spin-up as a better solution?
It's possible that the PSU is at fault... but you're never going to diagnose this to a reasonable level of certainty. My guess is that it's not the PSU; I'd expect a complete system shutdown to occur if one of the voltages goes out of spec, as this is the usual symptom of an overloaded PSU.
Buying a more powerful PSU may solve the problem if the PSU is the problem. On the other hand, getting a Motherboard with staggered spin up will solve the PSU problem (since you're no longer pushing such a huge load at startup)... and it also addresses one other possible point of failure: The disk controller.
I have one other tidbit to toss in: With 15 drives, it's possible that you're exceeding the combined limit for the +5V and +3.3V lines. 10W per drive is not an unreasonable estimate for peak spin-up power usage on the +5V line, and 15 drives * 10W per drive is 150W. Add in the other devices that draw power from the +5V and +3.3V lines, and you could have a problem, since the combined limit for the secondary rails is 180W.
The trouble is, you'll probably find it difficult to find a modern PSU (no matter how big) with more capacity on the secondary lines. 500W+ power supplies are designed to cope with high end processors and graphics, which require +12V almost exclusively. An overloaded +5V line simply isn't a common occurrence.
The only situation where hard drives overload PSUs is in server contexts, and staggered spin-up is the proper solution, not a heftier power supply.
It's possible that the PSU is at fault... but you're never going to diagnose this to a reasonable level of certainty. My guess is that it's not the PSU; I'd expect a complete system shutdown to occur if one of the voltages goes out of spec, as this is the usual symptom of an overloaded PSU.
Buying a more powerful PSU may solve the problem if the PSU is the problem. On the other hand, getting a Motherboard with staggered spin up will solve the PSU problem (since you're no longer pushing such a huge load at startup)... and it also addresses one other possible point of failure: The disk controller.
I have one other tidbit to toss in: With 15 drives, it's possible that you're exceeding the combined limit for the +5V and +3.3V lines. 10W per drive is not an unreasonable estimate for peak spin-up power usage on the +5V line, and 15 drives * 10W per drive is 150W. Add in the other devices that draw power from the +5V and +3.3V lines, and you could have a problem, since the combined limit for the secondary rails is 180W.
The trouble is, you'll probably find it difficult to find a modern PSU (no matter how big) with more capacity on the secondary lines. 500W+ power supplies are designed to cope with high end processors and graphics, which require +12V almost exclusively. An overloaded +5V line simply isn't a common occurrence.
The only situation where hard drives overload PSUs is in server contexts, and staggered spin-up is the proper solution, not a heftier power supply.
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I'd like to do a staggered spinup but my ATA RAID controller (3Ware 7506-12) doesnt support it and I dont know of any ATA RAID controller that does. It seems only SATA disks and controllers support staggered startup. And I dont have the money to replace 12 ATA disks and buy a SATA RAID card. The other three disks (two 500 gb SATA, one 100 gb ATA) are on the motherboard disk controller which doesnt support staggered startup either.