On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 09:21 -0400, ed@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > at 400 watt power supply does not always draw 400 watts from the wall. > But the efficiancy of the power supply is less when how running at > full power. That really depends on the design. Nothing's 100% efficient, some are better than others. Whilst true that they probably optimise a supply for a certain range, I doubt that there's a really great difference between most of the switch-mode power supplies, they're all mostly the same circuitry, with bigger caps and beefier transistors for the higher powered ones (so they'll last a higher duty cycle), and you'd still want to pick one that offers more than you're going to need. You'd also want to look carefully at the specs, you'll probably find many power supplies rated at what they can supply, but not mentioning how much they draw. I suspect that you'd have to look for special high efficiency units, rather than simply looking for lower wattage ones, as they're probably all rather poor. My beef with many power supplies is that they draw too much all of the time. We can't easily turn off computers, just shut them down. It's a pain to go crawling under desks and around racks to reach the power points. And you don't want someone turning off the wrong point. -- (This box runs FC5, my others run FC4 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
