Power Supply: Supermicro P4DL6 Board?

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Mark Hahn wrote:

> > Has anyone recently analyzed how much power each of the subunits of
> > a PC uses, i.e. how much power which mainboard, hdd, etc.
> 
> it's not hard to approximate this by reading the specs of each component.
> obviously, CPUs are the main consumers, probably followed by power hardware
> next (PS inefficiency, as well as the on-motherboard converter.)

The CPU power numbers vary.  You find people quoting design limits
(~80W), typical power (25W with moderate desktop usage), average power (15W
averaged over a day).

For the G5 I've only seen optimistic typical power guesses directly
compared to worst case for x86.  That's probably unfair: while it likely
does use less power, it's not yet obvious that the total system uses
less power to achieve the same performace as the Opteron.

> disks are much, much cooler than they used to be, probably dropping 
> below power consumed by ram on most clusters.

Note that most performance-oriented RAM types now have metal cases and
heat sinks.  They didn't add the metal because it _looks_ cool.

>  naturally, if you've 
> got 6 15K RPM SCSI disks in a node with just 1G ram, that's completely
> different!  even things like high-speed nics often amount to <10W,
> which simply doesn't compare to the ~80-90W per high-end CPU...

GbE NICs used to use >10W, more than half used in the transceiver chip.
Today the typical GbE NIC is a single chip in the 3-5W range.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
914 Bay Ridge Road, Suite 220		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993

_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf