You could try the Winmate DC-DC that electrodacus is selling. It's on sale for $30 right now, I picked one up. One thing I like about it is that you dont need a regulated 12V to run it, so that should make finding an AC adapter easier. Plus it's cheaper.

Alot of the gold lower wattage (<300W) psus seem to be manufacturered for OEM use and are nearly impossible to find anywhere for a reasonable price.

I ended up picking up on eBay a 120W LiteOn PA3717U-1ACA. From the Energy Star list of power adapters, this one was cheap at only $30 shipped and has 90% efficiency. I completely forgot about the peak power at startup. There is no mention anywhere of what kind of initial peak/surge power the Winmate...

After looking around a bit, it seems FSP makes some high efficienc bricks such as the FSP120-xxxx and FSP-150-xxxx series. I also found a spreadsheet with tests of various power adapters here: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_product.showProductGroup&pgw_code=ACD The Cooler Mase...

Electrodacus has his 120W Winmate DC-DC power supplies for 10% off, so I thought I would pick one up. Now I just need help picking out an efficient AC-DC power brick (18-28V). It doesnt seem as straightforward as picking out an ATX psu, because you can just look at the 80plus rating. No one really s...

I have a micro-atx board and was wondering if you guys have good recommendations for WHS cases. Ideally Im looking to imitate the HP Mediasmart or Acer H340 kind of look, but I suppose drive cages aren't a necessity. I know it's hard to ask for something small and compact, yet is able to accomodate ...

Wow Im surprised the EA380 draws so little power at low loads. From the 80plus charts, I would estimate the EA380 to be less than 75% efficient at the low loads you tested at. So the other power supplies must be even worse at efficiency...perhaps less than 60%. For such a low load, I wonder if there...

I've got a WD 160GB hard drive that is reported by SMART to have 20 read errors and about 3 unrecoverable sectors. Previously, I've had a WD 640GB drive which reported to have bad sectors a while ago, but after writing zero's to the drive and doing a full format, the SMART values all went back to 0 ...

Other than underclocking/undervolting the CPU, memory, VGA, PCI, another thing you could do is turn off all the unnecessary onboard stuff like audio, IDE channels, parallel port etc... But I doubt that will make any measurable difference. There's only so much you can do on the software side before h...

Im doing some searching here and it appears the Dell PW116 is an equivalent to the RM112 according to 80plus. But the test sheet for the RM112 does not mention anything about the PW116. Anyone know how Dell labels these things? Would it be a safe assumption that the PW116 has the same high efficiency?

Is there a pinout diagram on the case? Or did you just match up the colors on the output wires of the Dell PSU to a standard 24 pin ATX connector? Dell makes quite a few high efficiency, low power PSUs actually, it's just too bad most of them dont follow ATX standards.

I doubt they disabled the constant head park/unpark feature as in the older EADS series. The idle and seek power consumption is equal in the drive's main spec page, but if you look into the datasheet of the drive, the power consumption at idle/seek is equal to the older EADS. Must just be a misprint.

Crap...after the 7200.11 fiasco, I was hoping Seagate would have improved their 7200.12 line. One thing that's good about the 7200.12 compared to the similar WD Blue is that there are less platters on the 7200.12...which I would have thought increases reliability. However, the Seagate doesnt have th...

Would underclocking ram significantly reduce the errors? I have my 667mhz ram underclocked to 400mhz in my server to save some power and because I figure it might be more stable that way. Also, would errors in the memory usually lead to a crash, or could it lead to corrupt data being stored on your ...

I've always had Western Digital drives, but recently I picked up a Seagate 500GB 7200.12 drive for cheap. I also have another 80GB Seagate EE25 in my car. With Western Digital, the SMART seems to be intuitive and if the read error rate is non zero, then it could indicate you are having a problem. Wi...

From my experience with these drives, roughly the level of noise from quietest to noisiest (spinning noise): WD Blue 2.5" < WD Green 3.5" < WD Blue 3.5" I would say for the 3.5" drives, the WD Green is noticeably quieter then the Blue. However, both the WD Green and the WD Blue 2.5" parks their head...

So has anyone actually successfully used any of these high efficiency low power supplies, or atleast been able to find a place to purchase them cheaply? Too bad most of these power supplies have non-ATX mounting standards...Im curious to see pics of how people have been mounting their supplies. Also...

It's not just the WD Green that has this problem, but probably all the other 3.5" "Green" drives and pretty much every modern day notebook drive. I used to be worried about the head parking issue, but then realized in all this time, there is not even a SINGLE test/study done on whether the issue wil...

Ive never actually used an AMD CPU with CnQ before actually. With WHS, how do you ensure that it is working? Do you have to install a driver for QnC to work, or is it handled by the motherboard? I already clocked my LE-1250 CPU down to 1ghz @ 0.9v so I doubt CnQ will do anything further past that. T...

Does anyone know what is the efficiency of the Gateway power supply that electrodacus includes with the Winmate PSU? Does it get very hot under heavy loading?

Im thinking about picking up one of the DC-DC PSUs + AC adapter then take it apart and put it inside an old broken ATX power supply.

Another update. It appears that the GA-MA74GM-S2 board + LE-1250 boots fine and WHS runs fine when the LE-1250 is clocked to 1ghz and 0.8v, but the board will hang when rebooting. I had to bring the voltage up to 0.9v for it to be stable. Unfortunately now, my idling power is 42W which isnt much of ...

Update: Ok I got my new system installed. Summary of what I have: AMD Sempron LE-1250 CPU + Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 Motherboard 1.5GB Ram (Kingston ValueRam 512MB + 1GB) 640GB WD Blue OS drive 1TB WD Green data drive Antec Earthwatts 380W PSU APC BE450G UPS Im surpri...

Yea, I realize the Biostar A740G is better than the Gigabyte board in almost every way (ECC support, SATA card support in the PCIe-x16, lower power), but like I mentioned, I really couldnt find anywhere to get the Biostar for cheap here in Canada. But I figure Ill probably never need more than 6 har...

Thanks for the detailed reply. I was curious because SPCR did a review on the popular Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 and I believe it was paired up with a fairly low power processor, yet the review stated that the VRMs get really hot. Im assuming that motherboard designers design the boards such that the VRM...

With my build I was thinking of picking up an Arctic Cooling 7 Pro Rev2 and running it fanless. But then I came across this article which seems to indicate a correlation between VRM cooling and power efficiency: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article285-page4.html The cooler the VRMs, the less power ...

I keep my WHS in the basement so noise isnt really an issue. But this is the cheapest AM2 heatsink that my local retailer sells, so I figure why not make it fanless if possible.

Im planning on picking up an LE-1250 processor and underclocking it to 1ghz at 0.85 - 0.90 volts and use it in a WHS build. My case is fairly large, but the only exhaust is from the power supply, which isnt very strong (Antec Earthwatts 380). But the LE-1250 is a very cool processor. I dont have muc...

Does anyone know how the Sempron 140 compares to the LE series such as the Sempron LE-1250 or Athlon LE-1640 in terms of power consumption?

I cant seem to find any of these processors in Canada at a decent price. If anyone has one of these AMD AM2 CPUs (including heatsink) for sale, let me know your price shipped to Canada. I'm a newbie here, but if you want feedback I have references on other forums. Other low power AM2 CPUs will be co...

I have an Earthwatts 380W, which is supposed to have APFC, so Im assuming power factor is negligible?