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DTHCND
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Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:49 am

I was just have one question about this... I went to a store to buy this and he said not to cause you need an electrician to install a special outlet (the kind a oven uses)... For some reason I think that is complete BS,,, So if someone could correct me if I am wrong, those special outlets are 240V and the Ultra X4 1200W is 115 - 230W... And a standard Canadian outlet is 120V???
 
Farting Bob
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:56 am

Do you run half a dozen PC's from the same PSU, or have more GTX480's than limbs?
If not then you do not need such a stupidly overpowered PSU. Its the most rediculous overkill for all but a handful of people.
But getting back to your point, no you dont need a special plug. My kettle uses more Watts than this PSU is capable of and i dont need an electrician to install it.
 
DTHCND
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 12:14 pm

Ya I know it's overkill... I'm buying it for a friend that is upgrading the power supply in his system... I asked him why he wants 1200W... He said
My system is currently running 6 ATi Radeon HD 5970's, and I am planning on putting in another 6 - 8
Don't ask me how or why he is running so many GPU's I got no ****in idea... But I am going to assume he is right about needing 1200W if he is planning on running 14 5970's... Edit: My system isn't quite a thermal plant as his... Mine is a 750W with 2 ATi Radeon HD 5970's, Intel i7 930, P6X58D-E, and 6 1GB DDR3-1333 RAM... 22X DVD+/-RW Drive, and some other stuff (that use less power)... After doing some research the most my system can use is 700W so a 750W is ok for it... Can't hurt to have to much Wattage...
Last edited by DTHCND on Mon Aug 09, 2010 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
Zoomastigophora
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 12:17 pm

How is that physically possible? I don't know of any boards with 14 physical PCIe 16x lanes. Hell, is there even a chipset capable of supporting that many links?
 
DTHCND
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 12:24 pm

Like I said I got no ****in clue... I think the bus load is low for them though... My best guess is he has a riser car that connect to a PCI-E and has multiple connectors on... But ya I got no clue... That's just a guess... Edit: He explained to me how he got the software end working... Sort of... He said the Native BIOS doesn't support it, but he has a modified Linux distro, (or program... Didn't quite understand him), that supports it regardless if BIOS supports it... (I didn't quite get that either, but I'll just assume he knows what he is doing)...
 
[SDG]Mantis
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Mon Aug 09, 2010 12:54 pm

I generally go to [H]ardOCP for their power supply reviews. They don't review this particular model, though. A lot of the reviews of Ultra power supplies have been truly awful. But [H] gave the Ultra X3 1600w an Editor's Choice Gold Award...something that very few PSUs get.

So, I am wary of Ultra, but they do have some good products.

Antec has a TruePower series 1200w in that price range and the Kingwin Mach 1 1220W apparently won an [H] silver award (at least that's a Newegg tag...I see a [H] review for a 1000w Kingwin supply that won a silver). The Corsair AS1200 has a Gold rating and is about $50 more.
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StuG
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sat Aug 14, 2010 3:25 am

If you are dropping some money and powering THAT much expensive hardware a more reputable brand like Corsair or Seasonic might be in the works....
 
PrecambrianRabbit
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sat Aug 14, 2010 5:32 pm

I *really* want to see pictures of a 14x 5970 system.
 
UberGerbil
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sat Aug 14, 2010 6:17 pm

A bunch of things not adding up here.

First, 1200W is fine on a typical residential circuit: in both the US and Canada (AFAIK) they're typically rated for 15A @ 120V, or 1800W (you can verify this by looking at the breaker in the panel). Many, many high-wattage consumer appliances are 1500W -- space heaters, microwave ovens, electric kettles -- and work fine on such circuits. So a 1200W PSU shouldn't be any kind of problem (provided you don't have any other significant loads on that circuit, obviously). The guy at the computer store (Future Shop by any chance?) clearly doesn't know what he's talking about.

But I don't know what your friend is talking about either. Even with a 1200W PSU, how exactly is he intending to power 14 PCIe cards? They expect to draw some of their power from the PCIe lanes themselves, and no matter what kind of "riser" arrangement he might have that's going to be problematic. Equally problematic is bandwidth, because pretty much all chipsets top out in the ~22 lane range so most of those cards are going to end up with no more than PCIe 1x bandwidth to memory which very easily will bottleneck many HPC loads (at least the ones worth throwing 14 GPUs at), though for many datasets he's going to be bottlenecked by storage as well. Is he trying to crack encryption or something? At any rate I assume he's intending to do some kind of HPC / GPGPU application, since such a setup is pointless for graphics. And if he is doing some kind of ghetto HPC, why is using ATI cards (this is what Fermi/Tesla is for)? And how is he intending to cool this setup?
 
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sat Aug 14, 2010 6:28 pm

Sounds like your friend is building a GPU-based compute server of some sort. Definitely a niche application, and one of the few where it might actually make sense to have a PSU like this.

As others have noted, as long as there's nothing else on the same circuit, 1200W should not be a problem.

Quality of Ultra hardware is rather variable. Some of their products are great value for the money, while others are complete junk that you couldn't *pay* me to use. For what it's worth, their PSUs generally seem to be OK (in my experience).
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sun Aug 15, 2010 12:31 am

The only Ultra power supply that I've used failed from bad capacitors after less than two years.

I've had better luck with SeaSonic, Antec earthwatts and PP&C Silencer power supplies.
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sun Aug 15, 2010 12:51 am

JustAnEngineer wrote:
The only Ultra power supply that I've used failed from bad capacitors after less than two years.

Was that after the crest of the bad capacitor wave, or during? Most of the Ultra PSUs I've bought have been in the past ~3 years; several are running 24x7 and none have failed so far (fingers crossed).

JustAnEngineer wrote:
I've had better luck with SeaSonic, Antec earthwatts and PP&C Silencer power supplies.

Yes, Seasonic and PP&C seem to be consistently good. Antec had their share of capacitor issues back in the day; every single one of the Antec TruePower PSUs I bought in the early '00s died of capacitor failure.
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sun Aug 15, 2010 1:08 am

just brew it! wrote:
Yes, Seasonic and PP&C seem to be consistently good. Antec had their share of capacitor issues back in the day; every single one of the Antec TruePower PSUs I bought in the early '00s died of capacitor failure.
I gave most of those away before they failed. :D I figured that if they lasted 4-5 years, that wasn't too bad for cheap power supplies in that era. There's a spare earthwatts EA-430D sitting in my father's closet for the day that the old (probably TruePower) PSU in his system gives up.
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Sun Aug 15, 2010 1:23 am

JustAnEngineer wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Yes, Seasonic and PP&C seem to be consistently good. Antec had their share of capacitor issues back in the day; every single one of the Antec TruePower PSUs I bought in the early '00s died of capacitor failure.

I gave most of those away before they failed. :D I figured that if they lasted 4-5 years, that wasn't too bad for cheap power supplies in that era. There's a spare earthwatts EA-430D sitting in my father's closet for the day that the old (probably TruePower) PSU in his system gives up.

Most of mine didn't make it anywhere near 4-5 years.
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DTShakuras
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Tue Aug 17, 2010 11:38 pm

Out of curiosity, when you all say how long your Antec or Ultra power supplies lasted, did you mean it in terms of 24/7 continuous usage?
 
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Re: Ultra X4 1200W?

Wed Aug 18, 2010 1:20 am

DTShakuras wrote:
Out of curiosity, when you all say how long your Antec or Ultra power supplies lasted, did you mean it in terms of 24/7 continuous usage?

Yes. Most of my systems fold, so they're left on 24x7.
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