On Tuesday 05 February 2008 11:24, Per Jessen wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
... I meant actually measuring the voltage with a multimeter.
I thought you might have meant just that, but I hadn't checked the motherboard for any specific test/measurement points. Are they normally marked/indicated? (for mere mortals to access with a probe I mean). Regardless, I'm not sure if a regular multimeter would have really helped catch subtle variations - maybe an oscilloscope. Have you tried it with a plain millivoltmeter?
The only thing an oscilloscope would disclose is excessive hum. I think any decent digital voltmeter with two and a half digits of precision would be sufficient. As to taking the measurements, the back side of the molex connectors usually allow a probe to contact the edge of the connector pin, and that's sufficient to get a reading.
...
Yeah, I did just that. Initially I was thinking 500-550W, but when I considered that the box would go unstable (under load) without major disk-activity and without the high-consumption graphics card, I decided to go a bit further and picked a 850W supply. Pricewise there wasn't much of a difference, and I didn't want to go for e.g. 500W only to see it too give up under full load.
That's a good idea if you expect to expand the system or re-purpose the cabinet for something heftier later. Offhand, I don't know how the efficiency of today's power supplies varies with the percentage of their rated output they're producing. In other words, does a higher-capacity PSU consume more mains power for a given level of consumption on its output side? If so, you wouldn't want to have such a large PSU, since that would be wasteful.
/Per Jessen, Zürich
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org