Need some tech jargon decoded

[geoffry]

What exactly does this mean? "450W PCI Express-compliant system power supply with a combined 12V current rating of 30A or more."

Does that mean that the 12 V rail needs 30 amps? If so I can't find anything that does that....

Therefore I would estimate it means something a little different, any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[geoffry]

I think I figured it out. It wants both +12 V rails to add up to atleast 30 A eh?

 

[sirheck]

yeah check out mr. families psu 101 its pretty good.

 

[Giraffe]

my guess is that you are looking to run an x1950pro?

the combined Amps on all of the +12V rails need to be 30 or higher

this can mean 2 +12V rails at 18A or 3 +12V rails at 17A or whatever, you get the idea

 

[geoffry]

Hey,

I read the PSU 101 last night and it helped a bit.

What I'm doing is upgrading my athlon 3500+ to a 4800+ x2 (already shipped, halfway to my house now).

I have 2 gigs ram an x700 pro GPU, a DVD rom and DVD burner, second vid card for 3 moniters (just a cheap PCI ATI card, forget what model) and a hauppage TV tuner.

When I got the custom build 18 months ago I didn't know too much about comps so I took his advice on some components.

What I got now is a 230W generic PSU (I'm surprised I can run with no problems on it the way I am setup, lol). With the CPU upgrade I'm also going to be getting a DX 10 card in the next month or 2 but figured the PSU with the new CPU would be wise.

I gotta crappy mobo in this build so I won't be OCing any, just plunked in the x2 to extend its lifetime another 12-18 months and then get a nice quad core system.

The PSU I was looking at was the thermaltake 550 W one, I checked the specs and has 19 A to both 12 V rails for 38A between them, what I got from the PSU 101 was that I should take 3-5 A off that number getting roughly 33 A, which would be sufficient for the caliber of DX10 card I would be getting. (I looked at the GTS as that will be roughly the type of card I get, either from ATI or Nvidia I'm not sure yet, gonna wait for ATI to put theirs on the mkt first).

Thanks.

 

[Giraffe]

The PSU I was looking at was the thermaltake 550 W one

most of the Thermaltake's except for the Tough Power series arent very good afaik

 

[geoffry]

"Example: We have a 450W PSU. It supplies a max of 230W to the 3.3v and 5v rails. It's +12v rail only has 18A and has a max power of 216W. Adding the two numbers up is well over the 450W the PSU can supply at one time. The Ampes listed per rail is the max the rail can handle before failing. This is not the aperage that is provided to that rail. "

I guess I missunderstood...I assumed that the 38 A was the max before it would quit and subtracting a couple A from the combined rails would be a safe bet.

What does that really mean then?

 

[geoffry]

No, the rest I understood well, just that paragraph confused me I guess, I wasn't sure exactly what you meant.

So you mean I should calculate the wattage on the 3.3 and 5v rails, then calc for the 12V, see if they add up to the advertised wattage?

Also, the 2nd vid card is only used durign the day for trading stocks. At that time I only have my trading platform up, news service, chatrooms, messenger and skype...nothing too taxxing for either GPUs.

When I want to play a game or watch movies I dual boot into a second OS with that card disabled, so for gaming and movies only the one card is working.

 

[geoffry]

Ah. Gotcha.

Thanks for the info.