Thursday, January 04, 2007

Enough Power To Silence

The original title for this article was "Enough Power To Silence The Toughest Power Critics", but at 2000 Watts cold cranking power, I shortened it a little bit.

That's what this power supply will crank out, 2000 watts. For a single computer.

Maybe I'm too critical, but it appears that this is a product that has come, not whose time has come. It might prove once and for all that invention is the mother of necessity. I can't expound upon the inanity of this thing any better than the VP of sales from Ultra can:

While 99% of our readers might be scratching their heads wondering why release a product with so much power, George Ali from Ultra can answer that for you. "It's not so much that we believe personal computers today need as much as 2000W of power," explains George Ali, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Ultra Products. "In fact, most household circuits can't even provide the AC power this unit would require in order to put out 2000W of DC power. But there's the always-inevitable questions of 'Do I have enough power?' or 'Does my power supply have enough juice where my high end components need it.' That is why we have put together this 2000W unit; as the end all of power supplies as far as DC output goes. With as much as 1800W available on the 12V alone, there should be no concern whatsoever that there is enough power available for quad core, quad GPU or large drive arrays."


So, my household circuits won't even support it. I really want to know what the efficiency rating of this thing is - do I dare try and get laugh by saying it's not Energy Star compliant?

2 comments:

Gabe Humphreys said...

It is my understanding that the efficiency of PC power supplies decrease drastically as the voltage drawn from them nears their rated throughput.
For example, if a PC with a modern processor, video card, optical drive and two hard drives is drawing 500 Watts, then an 800 Watt rated power supply will draw 650 from the wall to feed 500 to the guts of the PC, whereas a 2000 Watt rated power supply will draw only 550 from the wall to give 500 to the PC's internals.
Anyone out there able to explain it better than my admittedly poor attempt?

Mark Ontkush said...

Hi Gabe,

thanks for posting, this is interesting, and I think true to some degree. I will look into it and report.

mark