power consumption of system

Nietzschean

i've a 460watt psu in my dual 2.4ghz xeon precision 530 dell workstation, basically earlier i got several cache write failures n disk access stuff happening across different bus's, ide/scsi , i'm trying to work out if the 460watt psu is good enough.. in it i have :

pci/agp:
nvidia 6800 gt oc'd to about ultra speeds
second 10/100 ethernet card
extra 5 port usb 2.0 card
Power connectors (pretty much all in series..gotta love dell..):
nvidia 6800 gt oc'd to about ultra speeds
2 * 36gig scsi hd's
1 * 18gig scsi hd
1 * 250gig sata hd
1 * dvd reader

1.5gig ram, those dual xeon's i can't imagine help much either...

is it lacking power or something else up?

jessy

I would say its the power alright. Did you recently add any new components? what make id the PSU?

Nietzschean

added the sata hd about 2 weeks ago............
tbh can't quite get decent access to the psu to see any details on it, dell yokie its in a section under the main case sorta...

RicardoSmith

Dual Xeons, 4 hard disks one optical drive and a GFX card. As you can buy the PC like that from Dell I doubt that they'd let you if it couldn't handle it. Any server can handle a stack of hard disks and dual cpus so its not that excessive.
It could be a hardware conflict or anything. AFAIK the Delll workstations use a custom PSU. I dunno if you'll be able to get a higher rated replacement. I disconnect things and keep testing till you find the source.

halenger

Could be OEM sorta PSU (I mean not a very high quality one) especially if this is one of those dirt cheap Dell servers that made such a noise (in more ways than one). You've quite a lot of stuff in there.

I just ran it through this: http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

It says very close to 500 Watts by my estimates. Doesn't allow you to enter dual processors so I just ticked a few extra peripheral boxes to add up to close to 87W.

If you're running port powered USB devices then you've got another drain there.

Might be worth your while to pick up a nice silent 550W PSU. I've been told those servers are noisy buggers - that might help quieten it also!


-On seeing Ricardo's post... You'd best check if you _can_ replace the PSU on that. Those silly AT/ATX hybrid crazy things Dell use at times are a Dell only jobbie. *shudders*

Nietzschean

halenger wrote:

I just ran it through this: http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

It says very close to 500 Watts by my estimates. Doesn't allow you to enter dual processors so I just ticked a few extra peripheral boxes to add up to close to 87W.

Thanks for that, nice link, yeah looks ugly enuf, 4th hd must've pushed it that bit too far...

-On seeing Ricardo's post... You'd best check if you _can_ replace the PSU on that. Those silly AT/ATX hybrid crazy things Dell use at times are a Dell only jobbie. *shudders*

I can't, but i've little problems adding a second psu if needs be, i don't like my machine randomly deciding not to access my devices....

halenger

Yeah that sounds painful. I'm running a 6800GT on an OEM 300W. Even that causes some problems but with only 1 hard drive at the moment it's not too bad. Hope to replace the PSU with a nice cheap, silent, more powerful one though.

"Quiet is the new loud."