Hey everyone,

I am looking into expanding our renderfarm a bit with barebones from shuttle. I found a case that does support quad cores but it has a 250 watt powersupply. I never understood the ideas of powersupplies anyways. So I guess a powerfull cpu needs a lot of juice. These machines will crunch frames by frames and the cpu usage will be constant at 100%. The model iam talking about is the Shuttle SG31G5. No graphics will be installed and only the onboard gfx will be used. Its a Graphics Media Accelerator 3100.

Thx in advance

Ralf

If someone knows a better case and cheaper dont hesitate to tell me

i would be surprised if a quad will run at 100% with a 250w.

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

^ Agreed. Minimum I would say is 300W

If its a decent quality power supply then 250 watt is fine. The highest wattage quad for kentsfield (old quad) was 130 watt. Yorkfield quads (new ones) the highest wattage for a regular processor is 95watts while extreme can be up to 150 watt. Motherboard is most likely about 20-30 watts, each memory module is roughly 12.5 watts (some are only 8 watts), optical is around 10 watts and each fan should not be more than 5 watts worst case. Remember 95 watts for most new quads is the most that processor will draw under max load. Unless you max all 4 cores it will use less most of the time. You should be fine.

The way processors are shrinking in die size they draw less power and create less heat. I just bought a Q9450 last week and you should see the size of the heatsink it came with. Its tiny. I have only seen one this small on celerons before. I had no heat problems with that system.

Thx guys,

According to the link from cisco it is impossible to put a quad into that barebone with that powersupply. According to rozar it is possible. Argh. Due to 3D rendering the cpu is almost all the time on 100%, so i am not sure if this barebone is a good choice then?

Why not try using a psu calculator to determine if 250w will be enough?

It will be fine with the 250w Shuttle PSU. Many users on Sudhian.com run quads with 9600gt or 8800gt for gaming machines. Some users run Folding@Home on Quads in Shuttles. Shuttle PSUs are of very high quality, and repeatedly defy manufacturer "recommended" specifications. Perhaps it has something to do with the motherboards having less expansion slots and using less power than a full-size ATX

Be careful of PSU calculators. The one at eXtreme looks pretty good but unless they use the exact parts you are using then they are guessing. And you can bet they will guess on the side of caution.

Just do a power budget, its simple once you know the current draw of YOUR components. Most manufacturers have the specs if you look hard enough.

I like Asus and I use A LOT of their equiptment but if you want to see a funny PSU calc look at theirs.
http://support.asus.com/PowerSuppl [...] uage=en-us