Silent Power Supplies!

[Áedán]

The German website, dirkvader took a look at a bunch of silent and nearly silent power supplies. Including in the PSUs they tested was one from a company called Numerical Control Silence (NC-Silence for short). The heatsink on the back of it looks impressive, and it looks just as impressive on the inside. It's also a 420W beast!

There's more details over at dirkvader.de (Babelfish link)

[Gizmo]

That is truly a nice looking unit for quiet power.

[mookydooky]

It love the idea, but it looks kinda big. I'm not sure if it would fit in my case...

[Áedán]

The PSU heatsink sticks out the back, but the PSU box itself is a standard size. As long as the hole in the back of your machine doesn't obstruct the heatsink, you should be ok.

[danrok]

I wonder if we will see watercooled PSU's. I would imagine the water block would need to be external, for safety reasons. Heatpipes could transfer the heat to a cooling block on the outside of the case.

[Gizmo]

TBH, I really don't see the compelling need at this stage, Danrok. We aren't dealing with the kinds of power densities that we are with CPUs, and power FETs and such are quite happy at 60C. (One power supply unit I worked with a while back was designed to operate at AMBIENT temps of 60C. The FETs would get to about 100C. Designed operational life was 5 years.).

[dod]

A quick google was quite eye opening. There have been a few and I did actually find one retailing at about 230 Euro's

Here's a home made one

http://www.digital-explosion.co.uk/i...p?articleID=65

[Áedán]

The one thing that /always/ concerns me about the DIY ones is that there's no longer much isolation between the mains side and the low voltage side. Normally the transformer ensures there's no connection between the two, but DIY water cooling usually ends up coupling the two together. At that point, you're relying on a single bit of thermal pad to keep 300V DC away from your system.