Thanks RedAE102 for the update. Good to know that NewEgg is fixing the issue at no extra cost to you. I frequently order from NewEgg because of their prices and good reputation. I went to Ruth's Chris last night for dinner with my wife - our appetizer didn't make it out in a timely manner (our meal ...

Haven't seen many people testing power draw from switches, mainly because they typically don't draw that much (around 10w or so would be normal, I guess). It wasn't mentioned whether you want 100Mbps or 1Gbps. There is a noticeable power draw difference between the two. Even running 1Gbps equipment ...

Usually it may be a better choice to pick up the one which tops at idle. Yep, unless you are doing a lot of gaming or other high CPU activity when the computer is on, you'll likely have the computer near idle for 90% of the time it is on. That said, it's not easy to find a PSU whose efficiency peak...

Sparkle 80+ 200W P/S $49, fan starts at 50% load - details here , specs over there . Interesting! In a system with an Intel G33 motherboard and Intel E6750: S12 330 - 52w at the wall. SPI220LE - 47w at the wall. The S12-330 is probably about 65 efficient at that load (~33w output), so the SPI220LE ...

You may well be right, but the manufacturers aren't listening, nor are they likely to do so. How much profit do they make on a $35 PSU? How much profit do they make on a $135 PSU? Not much, if I had to choose between a $50 200w PSU or a $50 400w PSU with the same efficiency curves according to load...

your own example only saves 5w. are you serious? 5w? There are plenty of applications where if you can save 10% power consumption, that is huge. And with computers using more and more of world wide power, saving even 10% across the board will result in huge overall savings! And at what cost? Practi...

Also, theirs not much need for 80plus certification with loads that low. If you think eboug it, even with an abysmal 70% effeciency at 50w DC ouput, thats only 21w waisted. If you think about a typical system with around 100w idle with 80% effeciency, thats 25w waisted. When your talking about such...

I've been thinking this for a while.

But with so many PSUs being 80plus efficient these days, perhaps it's time for an 85plus, 90plus and/or 95plus efficiency ratings which cover lower load levels as well, perhaps as low as 10%.

The technology is there to build efficient "wall warts". Look at your typical cell-phone charger these days, they don't get warm at all when left plugged in and don't even register on my Kill-a-watt. I would love to be able to get rid of the half-dozen or so inefficient wall warts I have for my thin...

My dead Samsung was on 24x7.

Yep, Socket 754 is another option, but one I wouldn't consider buying today if your are going to buy a mobo+CPU unless you never plan on upgrading it - You are stuck with single-core CPUs on that socket.

AM2 motherboards and CPU are very cheap now, and use less power than socket A (that's progress! :wink: ). Yep, even if you have some sort of low power Duron in that Socket A mobo, instead of buying a new one, you're much better off buying an inexpensive AM2 mobo (be sure to get onboard video for lo...

After buying a Spinpoint 1614N 160gb, manufactured in Feb 2005, because it was reviewed to be very quiet and then later have it die (bad sectors) a bit more than a year later and just out of warranty, I now make it a point to only purchase Seagate drives with their 5 year warranties. If I must buy a...

AMD Sempron LE-1100 Sparta 1.9GHz 256KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor @ NewEgg

Figure we need a link.

AM2 Sempron 3400+ $37 Mobo: $46-50 (10 choices) 1 GB RAM: $30 Seems like for only a small amount more you can get on the AM2 platform which gives you the room for at least dual-core processors (which already start at just $66 and only use a couple more watts at idle than a single core processor) dow...

The only other place I know that sells PicoPSUs is Logic Supply but I don't think they ship overseas, either.

that's assuming the motherboard is the problem... sounds more like psu to me. That's what I was thinking, sounds more like PSU than mobo to me as well. But if you do replace the mobo, I don't see any reason not to instead move to an AM2 motherboard with either a Sempron or Athlon 64, they are very ...

I don’t think the power consumption difference of the motherboard is really an issue here. I have a fully specified C2D desktop system (G33 chipset, IGP) that idles as low as 52W so there’s not that much room for improvement. Or are the newer AM2 chipsets significantly beating that? Yes, it's n...

While the max power consumption numbers are somewhat interesting, it would be nice to know what configuration they used to get that number.

Notably absent are idle power numbers as well.

Here's my PVR config: Sempron 3000+ (754) MSI K8MM-V 1GB DDR Nvidia GeForce FX5200 (12w) ST3320620AS 7200 SATA (7w) 2 PVR-250 (12w each) Seasonic SuperTornado 300 With CnQ on, it idles at 74w which is similar to your system. The PSU is probably about 70-75% efficient at those loads meaning it's actu...

I have this system running Fedora 7: Sempron 3000+ ASRock K8NF6G-VSTA (Socket 754) 1.5GB DDR 2 7200 rpm drives Seasonic Super Tornado 300 PSU Extra RTL-8169 GigE NIC (system is a firewall, too) It idles at 48w (make sure cpuspeed is setup to start and load the cpufreq_ondemand module!). Not undervol...

bbambrey wrote:I have DDR2 PC3200. (2 - 1gb sticks)

Can I insert this into any motherboard that supports DDR2 and it will clock down or do I need to shop for specific boards?

The motherboards Memory Timing / SPD detection should clock it down automatically if the motherboard is any good.

The advantage, to pick up on StanF, is that while you certainly increase arithmetically the possibility that you will *have* a drive failure each time you add a drive, the mirroring provided by RAID 1+0 (or RAID 10!) makes it much much less likely (compared to a single drive) that you will experien...

Doubling power and noise almost doesn't matter with 2.5" drives in a desktop; they are so quiet to begin with. By doing RAID10 you will get 60-90% more transfer rate, but will get an ~5% hit in access times. 5400RPM drives already have a pretty lame access time as it is, so this will not be fast. T...

ddrueding1 wrote:I live about 15 minutes drive from mini-box.com. If they were interested in submitting devices for testing, I'm happy to test.

The nice thing about testing 12v bricks is that it should be very easy to run tests since you only have to worry about a single load...

So we need someone to test the efficiency of power bricks? Great... That's one thing that has kept me from getting a PicoPSU - not knowing how efficient the various power bricks are that are available. It would be nice to get some efficiency numbers for more of the bricks out there. I am disappoint...

The key to getting good efficiency with the PicoPSU lies with the brick you use.

It's fairly obvious that your brick is not very efficient for whatever reason.

Is there any reason you didn't get an 80w brick instead? Can you tell us what brick you actually have?

However, I'm still curious whether the motherboard protection would be disabled with a user-set CPU voltage? I know the EIST and TM2 protection involves undervolting the CPU when it gets to high loads or temperatures, but not sure if the user-set voltage overrides it. I don't have any direct experi...

I think the thermal protection shuts off the PC when it gets too high. That said, if the HSF falls off, I doubt you have even 1 second before the chip is destroyed - no matter how low the voltage. Heh, you've got my name. :) While the case of CPUs blowing up if the HSF came off was possible with th...

The S12 range is not 80Plus compliant, the S12 II range is. Thanks for the correction. :) Anyway, just looking at the SPCR reviews, of the SS-300FD compared to the S12 series, kentc's numbers just about match up in terms of the expected efficiency and power draw. http://www.silentpcreview.com/artic...