UPSs and Active PFC PSUs.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2010 at 10:23:29PM -0500, Scott Sullivan wrote:
> Antec EarthWatts 380W, EA-380 (I miss labelled it as a 350W in my  
> original post).
>
> Product Link:
> http://store.antec.com/Product/power_supply-earthwatts/ea-380d-green/0-761345-27384-8.aspx
>
> Note: the link is for the EA-380D which is a slight revision. I own that  
> model too, but it's not currently in a machine on the UPS.
>
> I use these power supplies on file-server machines in 1GHz range with  
> between 6-10 Hard drives.

Well being it is only a bronce level 80plus certified, it isn't likely to
be as picky as a gold level 80plus certified high efficiency power supply.

Different designs have different levels of pickiness on their AC input
quality.

Of course to some extent, the fact that we use UPSs that take AC, convert
it to DC to store and then convert it back to AC (trying to make it look
like a sine wave again) to go into a power supply that converts it back
to DC for use by the computer is really really stupid.

We should have UPSs that putput DC and then use DC power supplies in
the computer.  That would probably save 20% power right there (at least
when running from the UPS battery), and elliminate an expensive complex
bit of the UPS and simplify the computer power supply (after all the
UPS needs the AC to 12V DC conversion already, so why not have a 12V
DC input to the computer power supply which then just has to take that
and regulate it a bit, and make a bit of 5 and 3.3V as well for the few
parts of the computer that isn't 12V these days).  No sine wave generation
issues, no conversion power waste, just simple efficient setup.
Telephone equipment has been doing this for decades, why can't we do it
for our computers too?

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists