Quote from: BiggieJohn on June 11, 2011, 04:58:29 AM

Quote from: gigabytecoin on June 09, 2011, 10:36:20 AM

I am considering spending almost $1,000 on 3-4 gold rated PSUs.

Seems to me they are little more than transformers.

If I could purchase 4*$30 PSUs simply to run the motherboard/cpu power... could I note create a massive single 12 volt rail that distributes power to say 30-40 video cards via pcie connectors at once?

I guess it would really suck if THAT power supply broke down... but still - anybody tried it or similar?

The PCIe bus spec only allows 30watts per slot, thats why most higher end video cards have external power connectors on them.
Sure, you probably could bridge together enough cheap power supplies to power all those cards. Or, come up with one really big 12V power supply capable of handling 100's of amps.

The problem with lower quality power supplies is the power you will get out of it then will have ripple, and inconsistent voltage regulation which will make bridging more then a few cheap supplies together difficult, since they will not supply current evenly across all the supplies.

A single very large supply has the other problem that it requires very thick cables, or copper buss bars to distribute all that power to the cards. Ciopper buss bars carrying hundreds of amps are dangerous at almost any voltage, and require regular maintenance to maintain good connections to prevent excessive heating of the buss or connectors.

I wouldnt risk thousands of dollars in GPU's connected to a makeshift 12V power supply, it's just not worth it.

Actually, powering ~20 GPUs off something like this might be quite a good solution for large mining farms: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/436983856/_YK_AD10KW_10kw_dc_regulated.html

It compares quite well to a computer PSU, and would cut costs a good bit for large scale miners.
--Efficiency of Whole Body: ≥86%. Source Voltage Regulation:
--Voltage-stabilizing ≤0.2%. Load Regulation: ≤2%; Ripple Voltage: ≤4%