i agree with rusty075 especially on the punctuation part, also on the wattages on the different voltage lines as well.

Zalman ZM300A-APF with Panaflo L1A:

- XP1800 Palomino
- 2x256mb DDR
- A7N8X Deluxe
- GF4Ti 4200
- Maxtor DM+9 80Gb
- WD800JB 80Gb
- LiteOn 40x CDRW
- Zalman 7000 cooler and 120mm NMB@5v rear case fan.

Zalman ZM300A-APF in:

MSI K7D Master-L dual Athlon motherboard
2xDuron 1.6 GHz
2x92mm Zalman fans @ 5V
1x80mm Vantec Stealth @ 5V
1x512Mb dimm
NVIDIA Riva TNT (er, not a gamer...)
Maxtor 40Gb HDD
Quantum 12Gb HDD
Fujitsu 5Gb HDD
Memorex 48/14/48 CDRW
Hauppauge PVR-250 TV Tuner
Aitech Wavewatcher TV Tuner
Soundblaster Live

rock solid, CPU temps stable at 45.

Looks like so far I've got the title of "most hardware running on a 300W power supply". =)

Summary:
2 Athlon XP CPUs, 4 hard drives, floppy drive, CDRW, 5 PCI cards, 1 AGP card, 5 80mm fans (case + CPU fans), 1 video card fan, on Zalman 300W APF w/Panaflo L1A @~9V.

Runs hot, stable, and quiet enough for me!

Details:
Zalman 300WAPF w/Panalfo L1A @~9V
Tyan Tiger MP
2x Athlon XP 1700+ CPUs
512mb ECC registered DDR RAM
2x Volcano 9 HS w/Panaflo L1As @7V
2x Maxtor DiamondMax 8 30GB FDB hard drives in RAID 1
Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB FDB hard drive
Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB FDB hard drive
Floppy drive
Plextor 16x10x40 CD-RW drive
Silicon Image IDE RAID PCI card
ATI FireGL Z1 128MB AGP video card
2x 10/100 PCI NICs
Pinnacle Systems DV500 hardware video capture/editing card
SB 128 PCI sound card
Panaflo L1A @5V
Panaflo L1A @12/9/7 (estimated) on Thermaltake H.M.L. switch
Generic 80mm @5V

This is starting to feel like a game of chicken. Who can hook up the most things to their computer without it blowing up?

It's how us geeks have fun!

Everytime I read this thread the overclockers on other forums piss me off more and more. Its gotten even worse now, everyone is recommeneding at least a 450w power supply for an average (fairly high end) gaming system. I always say, just get a decent 300w and youll be fine and I get my head chewed off.

I know what you mean, GamingGog. Its annoying but I just refer them to this thread and tell them to get a decent PSU rather than a 550W Q-tec which seems a favourite of overclockers the world over

Yeah, it's funny. I've read a few posts lately at OCforums and the like that are saying that a TruePower 430 is very marginal and you should basically consider a 475W as the minimum! Thes are invariably just a basic OC'ed system with 1 or 2 HDD's and optical drives and a R9600-9800 vidcard. I don't even bother responding 'cause I know I'd get flamed out of existance.

Zalman ZM300A-APF:

Pentium 4 1.6ghz
1 80gb Samsung drive
CNPS7000A-AlCu CPU fan
3 128mg SDRAM slots
Sapphire Radeon 9600 non-pro (fanless)
Soundblaster Live! [Value]
1 CD player
1 CD writer

My ECE4252 case isn't dampened and everything is running very cool (CPU at idle is 34/35 C), but I plan on upgrading to a P4 2.66ghz in the near future. I hope my Zalman PSU will still do a good job.

Fortron FSP-30060PN(PF) and Seasonic FS-350 easily handle the following load:

- Abit NF-7S (with integrated sound/ethernet/usb/firewire)
- Barton 2500+ at 3200+ speeds (extra voltage 1.7v)
- 2 x 512 MB DDR with extra voltage (2.9V)
- Radeon 9700Pro
- 2 x Seagate Barracuda IV 120 GB
- 2 x CDRW drives
- 1 x DVD+/-RW drive
- 1 x DVD-ROM drive
- 2 x sound card (PCI-cards) + external sound card box
- 1 x Firewire card
- 4 x fans (120mm, 92mm and 2 x 80mm)
- several USB peripherals (scanner, controllers, memory card reader, etc)
- PS/2 keyboard + mouse

regards,
Halcyon

sparkle 300w ( FSP300-60ATV )

amd xp1700+ @ 2.2ghz (vs 1.46 stock)
asus a7n8x-x
2 x 512mb pc3200
seagate V 120gb 8mb
radeon 8500
cdrw/tv tuner/sound/network cards
2 x panaflos + 7000A-alcu

just got a Nexus NX-3000 which runs the following just fine:

Epox 8kta3+pro mainboard (amd Xp1600, 768mb)
Nexus CPU and case fans.
Soundblaster 5.1
Firewire card
Adaptec 2940U2W
intel 100mb network card
Radeon 9600Se
IDE DVD and CDRW drives
2 maxtor 40gb 7200rpm harddisks
Seagate 7200rpm 10gb scsi harddisk
USB optical mouse

My first post here & I gotta say - I'm more than a little surprised by what I learned & WHAT I THEN DID ! I was looking here to select a psu for a new system I'm building for a friend : XP2200+ on a MSI KT3 Ultra2 w/ 512MB pc2700 2.5-3-3-6 2T. Memory just came in from eBay , so I wanted to test it soon & my old systems are all SDRAM. Time to get a psu ... but which one ?

Well after I read this thread , especially in the middle , about really small psu's (HowLowCanYouGo?) , I took a look at my little Epia mini itx setup which lives in a homemade "cigar box" w/ plexi top & bottom . I found a tiny little MOREX 150 watt psu for it in Europe . It's rated 3.3v@7a , 5v@12a & 12v@5a . There's a little 30GB IBM TravelStar in there too ... Hmmm , I wonder if there's any way this would fire up the MSI w/ the t'bred ? nah ...

DANG ! It works great !I used an old S3VirgeGX pci vid card. Added a floppy & a nic so I could load in the newest drivers & an optical wireless USB mouse to test for USB problems . None . So I figured I'd better see if I could overclock the wee out of it . No problem . Got it up to 160fsb , but the sandra scores(CPU best was 5926/2902) were starting to drop lower (???) & I was getting a little scared. Finally crashed @ 161 , so I backed it down to 156 & started stability testing after I played with fuzzy logic & checked my temps & volts . So here we are at 2106MHz @ 156fsb & fast mem settings - 37C idle & only in the 40's so far running hard . Stock cpu cooler . pcAlert sez 3.3v @3.28 , 5v @4.89 & 12v @12.06 , so the 5 volt is a tad low (would this be a problem?). But , hey , this is MAJOR horsepower on a HUNDRED AND FIFTYwatts !!!

& this thing is SOOO snappy next to my old 1gig TBird OC'd 1.4 & pouring out the heat , with it's giant 350 watt psu.

Thanks for the reality check !

Man, you guys are pretty harsh on the "performance enthusiast" crowd.

Of course, you're also right, but I am seeing something being overlooked...because sometimes, even with power supplies bigger is better (which means quieter, in our case.)

I just bought a Seasonic 460W Super Silencer. It'll eventually find a home in a P4 3.0+ (possibly prescott) system to be finalized next month. (I'm buying components now.)

Yes, it's almost certain to be "more power than I need." But don't mock me just yet.

All else being equal, given the same power draw, it should be as quiet or quieter than the other SS models of lower power rating...and that's the point, isn't it?

Now, I know it's dangerous sometimes to look at marketing material, but have a look at page 2 of the Super Silencer PDF:

http://www.seasonic.com/pdf/datasheet/0 ... lencer.pdf

Specifically, the chart that is just above the text "S2FC with different wattage models." While I'm extremely hesitant to take such charts "to scale", the point is, the 460w model should hold it's "minimum speed / noise" through a much wider range of power draw than the 300W model "good enough for most anyone" that is talked about in this thread.

To be sure, you obviously can't just apply this methodology across different brands...a crappy 500W power supply might be insanely louder at modest power draw than "designed for quiet" 300W power supply at full load. But I feel OK given that Seasonic is only doing this particular comparison within its own brand line.

I bought the 460W Seasonic for extra "noise" cushion, not particularly power cusion. The rig (again, possibly Prescott) will likey either be folding or encoding or gaming almost 24/7. I want to give myself the best possible chance of the power supply not having to increase the fan (or having to increase case fan speed) because temp / power draw, and having a higher rating should accomplish this.

As an aside, this is one area that I'd like to see SPCR Power Supply reviews improve upon. If they could create their own sort of Fan RPM or noise level vs. power draw profile for the power supplies they test (at least 3 or 4 power draw levels), that would be a great help. It would also be difficult to do in a controlled way of course....but that's what makes the data valuable.

i was looking for tips on how far my NX-3000 would go and I happen to find this thread. Well I'm glad I did. Looks like I could easily upgrade to an XP 3000+ later and still be good.

Welll here are my specs:

Athlon XP 1800+
Asus A7N8X-X
512MB DDR
Maxtor 160GB hard drive
Hitachi DVD-ROM
Lite-On CD-RW
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
Zalman CNPS-3000
1 x Zalman 80mm case fan.

In fact, this is virtually impossible given time & resource constraints.

1) ALL thermal fan controllers in PSUs respond ONLY to temperature (all the PSUs I have seen and know about, anyway). Any manufacturers' info about fan speed vs. power are merely generalized extrapolations -- estimates of the temp:power relationship are used.

2) Hence the temp of the environment in which the PSU operates has a huge bearing on the results. The real variables for the temp seen by the PSU thermistor are:
- PSU load
- PSU AC/DC conversion efficiency
- PSU fan speed / temp algorithm
- Proximity / position of intake vents to CPU
- CPU heat
- CPU cooling system
- Total heat dissipation of other components in case
- Case airflow
- Ambient room temperature
- Position of moon and PSU engineer's astrological sign

As this post is sticky, there is a decent PSU load estimator at:

http://takaman.jp/psu_calc.html?english

Please be aware that it calculates a worst case scenario where all components are stressed to the max at the same time. This rarely if ever happens in real world, unless you do it purposefully.

Still, it's good for giving you some ballpark as to how much power you need for each PSU voltage rail. Yes, look at load on each rail, not just total wattage. Too little current on specific rails or overspecified PSUs are the two most common reasons (IMHO), why people recommend the over-the-top PSUs.

regards,
Halcyon

Running from a no-name ("PowerUp") micro-ATX 230 watt power supply:

- Athlon 64 3200
- Radeon 9800
- Raptor 74GB 10K HDD
- Seagate 7200.1 160GB HDD
- Two case fans and two chip coolers
- DVD-RW drive
- Sandisk Imagemate 6-in-1
- M-Audio Revolution sound card
- 1GB RAM

And the power supply isn't even hot. No, it's not my regular supply: my SS-400 A2 is on RMA to be traded for an A1, and I thought I'd give this a try so I could keep playing Halo It works! And the PowerUp isn't even very loud (though it has a constant-speed fan)

I'm gonna come close to Legacy. Note that I'm not running a 300W power supply, but am measuring through a Kill-O-Watt, which averages 240W while running two instances of F@H.

• 2x Athlon XP 2400+ -- Actual XPs, not MPs. Operating at 133MHz FSB
• Asus A7M266-D
• 512MB of ECC Registered PC2100 Kingston Ram.
• 2x Thermalrights w/ L1As on them (I've never measured the voltage, but they have Fanmates attached).
• 1 120mm Panaflo FBK as an exhaust case fan.
• 1 92mm Zalman (ripped from a FB123) as an intake to cool hard drives.
• Plextor 708 DVD+/-RW drive
• 2x Samsung SP0411 40GB drives in Raid 1.
• 2x Seagate Barracuda V 120GB drives in Raid 0.
• Matrox G400 32MB
• Highpoint RocketRaid 404 card.
• Asus PCI USB2 card.
• 3com 3CR990 Fast Ethernet card (onboard processor to offload TCP/IP work).
• Generic black floppy.

I think this is a fair amount of hardware to run at under 300W.

I do have to confess that the new power supply I'm considering is going to be at least 350W, if not 400W. I plan on upgrading the video card in the future, and I'd like some headroom in terms of power so that the PSU will run efficiently and quietly.

A QTechnology 300W PSU running the following:

Asus A7V133C
1.33Ghz Athlon overclocked to 1.46Ghz (but running at 1.70V!)
512mb 133 SD-RAM
Samsung SP1213N 120GB, Seagate 7200.7 80GB, IBM Deskstar 80GB
Asus CD-ROM
Teac CD-RW
Internal IDE Zip Drive
Abit Geforce Ti4200
CNET LAN card
SBLive card
Promise ATA100 TX2 PCI card
USB 2.0 4-port PCI card
8 (yes, eight!) fans running at 5 or 7V
Labtec Webcam

This is all running in a Supermicro BX full tower case, which is very resonant, hence all the (mostly Panaflo) fans running at 5 or 7V.
MB/CPU temps are around 30/50C

I think the PSU copes pretty well with this lot, and still runs as silently as ever

One word of caution in regards to trusting manufacturer ratings:

a 300W PSU <> 300W PSU, even if the voltage loads on different rails are equal

Some manufacturers underspecify their PSUs. It's not uncommon for a good quality 300W PSU to be able to sustain a 400W continuous load.

However, on the other hand, it's quite possible to get a 300W labelled PSU that fails under a 170W load, even if voltage rail specific ratings are not exceeded.

But the question remains: how can we know which manufacturer ratings to trust?

Short: we can't, we just have to ask people like MikeC nicely to test them for us

What happens when you add the upcoming Nvidia GeForce 6800 to the mix? Nvidia says you should have a 480W PS minimum (?!?!)

l'INQ

Hello:



Welcome to SPRC!!! It is a learning experience for all of us -- I recently built my first Athlon 64 system:

Athlon 64 3000+ w/ stock HS & fan with Fanmate @ ~1900RPM
ECS 755-A2 (SiS 755 chipset) motherboard
1GB PC3200 2-2-2-6 Mushkin RAM
RAID 1 array of (2) 160GB Samsung SATA 8MB HD's
Matrox Millennium P650
US Robotics v.92 FAX modem
Samsung CD-RW
Iomega Zip 750
Mitsumi floppy/memory card reader
Enermax 120mm Adjustable exhaust @ ~4.2 volts
Globe 92mm (stock fan from Evercase) intake on Fanmate @ ~1060RPM

I originally was apprehensive about using a 300watt and I briefly considered a Fortron 350watt, but it has run swimmingly, first with a Fortron 120mm 300watt, and now with a Clever Power 300watt.

Looking for a quiet pc a decided to change my PSU and I bought a Nexus 3000 power supply.
Below you can see my computer configuration:
P4 2.8GHz HT, mobo Asus P4P800 Gold, Corsair memory 2x512 LLPT, RAID 1 array x 2 Seagate HDD SATA (80 Gb), sound card Audigy 2, video card Sapphire ATI 9800 pro, cd-writer Plextor, cd-rom Plextor, dvd Asus, 2 120mm fans.

The power consumption in idle is around 150 W, full load (gaming e.g. BF 1942) 220 W. Parameters measured with Energy Monitor 3000 from conrad.com

I've upgraded my system, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it's drawing 255W running two instances of F@H.

• 2x Athlon XP 2400+ -- Actual XPs, not MPs. Operating at 133MHz FSB
• Asus A7M266-D
• 512MB of ECC Registered PC2100 Kingston Ram.
• 2x Thermalrights w/ M1BXs on them (full throttle on the Zalman Fanmate).
• 1 120mm Panaflo FBK as an exhaust case fan.
• 1 92mm Zalman (ripped from a FB123) as an intake to cool hard drives.
• Plextor 708 DVD+/-RW drive
• 2x Samsung SP0411 40GB drives in Raid 1.
• 2x Seagate Barracuda V 120GB drives in Raid 0.
• ATI FireGL X1 128MB
• Highpoint RocketRaid 404 card.
• Asus PCI USB2 card.
• 3com 3CR990 Fast Ethernet card (onboard processor to offload TCP/IP work).
• Generic black floppy.

Keeping this both quiet and cool is a daunting task.

- Shuttle AN50R motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64
- 2 x 512 MB PC3200
- Ati Radeon 9800 Pro
- 2 x Samsung SP1614C (160GB SATA)
- 2 x DVD-/+RW drives
- 2 x CD-RW drives
- 1 x DVD-ROM drive
- PCI IDE controller
- 2 x sound card (one with an external break out box, using a molex connector)
- 3x80mm fans
- 1x90mm fan
= all running on a Fortron 300W PSU

regards,
halcyon

Fileserver

-main stuff
P4 1.8Ghz
256mb PC2100
S3 2meg AGP
4 channel SATA controller

-storage
2 x 20gig WD 7200rpm (one in Vantec hurricane thing)
2 x 80gig WD 7200rpm in fan cooled hotswap bays
1 x 36gig WD Raptor 10k

-cooling
Zalman CNPS 5500 (i think) /w 80mm (idles at 30c - load at 38c)
120mm panaflo el-fucking-loudo exhaust
92mm harddisk tray intake

-psu
Codegen 400w

guess i can add a couple more SATA drives (not that im even using 1/3 of the total space hah)!