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185W! Gotta love that price as well.
Reply to
JW
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I stand corrected.

Some of the reader comments are rather interesting. Still, with any of these "powerful" processors, a conventional air cooled machine is going to have a very hot breath and a rather large power supply. I just don't see this kind of power dissipation in a "dedicated game machine". Measuring the AC mains power consumption should settle the matter.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Sony Vegas software will push your processor usage up to nearly 100% and stay there for minutes. My Phenom II 955 machine normally idles

115-120 Watts but will peak about 100 more while Vegas is rendering a file. I'm almost tempted to try a 6 core processor to see what happens.

G=B2

Reply to
stratus46

I use Kino in linux to render raw DV capture. Can't find a suitable linux app to create dvd containers/structure etc.. in linux so I use a fairly inexpensive app called DVDtoX from VSO. Fast 10x frame rates on VBR video encoding usually 2000KB/s. Easy to use nice output. tried Sony DVD Architect trial, more than I needed. Linux is much more efficient at processor usage but applications aren't up to par.

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Reply to
Meat Plow

Have you any idea just how much processing power it takes to run a user-interactive story in real time, and then to 3D render the graphics in real time ? Do you think that they rate the 12v PSU for 23.5 amps in one version, and 32 amps in the other, for fun ? Those are not real questions, because I know full well when you stop and think about it, you know the answers, Jeff.

I've just looked at the rating plate on the bottom of one of the cases, and it is 240v (nominal UK line voltage) at 1.8 amps. I make that a maximum input power of around 430 watts. It's a switching PSU, so I reckon that we can rate that as being at the very worst 80% efficient, so that's still 345 watts potentially going somewhere. I'm prepared to go with 45 watts into ancillary circuitry on the board, which still leaves around 300 watts going somewhere. Perhaps I'm being naive, but my best guess is that it's disappearing into the two bloody great BGAs which the manufacturers are trying their utmost to heatsink. If you try to run one of these machines with the heatsinking not in place, it goes into thermal protect in about 5 seconds - and all it's doing then is booting. The heatplates on the BGAs are at this point hot enough to take your fingerprints off ...

Nope, I'm pretty sure that these two puppies are good for 150 watts apiece, when the machine is doing some real work.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:Q_Xeo.1360$c snipped-for-privacy@newsfe30.ams:

that assumes that all the power of the supply is actually used. I'm sure there is some reserve capacity there.

"max input power" is not "actual used power".

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Jim Yanik
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Reply to
Jim Yanik

Well, no. I'm not a power user. What little rendering I do is with bacon fat.

Actually, I don't know. I don't have any customers with such machines and have had zero experience with high power graphic workstations (other than early 1980's Applicon CAD stations) or game machines. I have worked on various network servers, which do burn such power levels. I have looked at a 3D MRI image processor, which had some manner of dedicated processor inside, but it certainly wasn't belching

400 watts of heat (my estimate by the amount of fan noise).

Ok, I stand corrected. I've been assuming that the CPU's are doing most of the power dissipation. I didn't think of a dedicated graphics processor or whatever the BGA chips are doing. Do you have a gun style IR thermometer? I use that to determine if anything is running hot. I use a black (non-reflective) cardboard tube attached to the lens to prevent it from picking up adjacent components. Incidentally, I have yet to find one where the laser dot actually points to where the device is measuring when in close proximity. You can also get a rough idea of how much effort is going into cooling. If the BGA's burn more power than the CPU's, then they're going to need more massive heat sinks and better air cooling. At 400 watts, I would think they would have gone to heat pipes and external radiators or maybe liquid cooling.

Incidentally, I repaired a P4 motherboard yesterday which used Artic Silver. My guess is that there was about 5 times as much Artic Silver smeared over the CPU (and down the sides where it does nothing) as necessary. The stuff down the sides was still fluid, so at $10 for

3.5 grams, I saved the excess.
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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Heh...reminds me of a previously repaired (not by me) QSC PLX series amp I opened up and scraped about a pound of white paste out of it.

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Reply to
Meat Plow

Hi!

Well, it used to be. ;-)

The Pentium 4 "Pres-hot" didn't earn that derogatory nickname for nothin'. I cringe to think of multi-processor systems and how much heat they were dumping into the air. I had a 3.4GHz Prescott P4 in a Dell Dimension 8300. On hot days, it had no problem equaling the sound volume of a small canister vacuum cleaner.

I remember reading that somewhere. I'm not sure that everyone--including some major manufacturers--got the memo. After removing the STK-2038 II module from my Techics SA-310 receiver, I found a massive amount of heatsink compound behind it. Wow.

Somtimes not by a *long* shot!

Really? I find that extremely surprising, especially as firmly as some of them hold on. They really do *seem* to be doing a good job.

Sometimes the heatsink compound has established a tight enough bond that the processor comes out firmly glued to the bottom of the heatsink, without so much as releasing the ZIF socket lever. I've seen that on Socket 478 and AM2+ boxen before. It's kind of scary to look down and realize the processor isn't where it should be!

William

Reply to
William R. Walsh

Well Jim, that was why I used the word "potentially", but judging by the size of the pins used to couple the power supply's output into the board - if you've been following the thread, you will recall that I previously described them as being of the size you would find on the line cord for a kettle - then I wouldn't say that there was too much in the way of reserve. Anyway, just think about that premise for a moment. When have you ever known a manufacturer of a piece of domestic grade electronics, to over-rate any aspect of it, let alone the power supply, by more than the few percent required to just about let it scrape by? It's all about cost, and they are not going to rate the rectifiers and magnetics and filter caps and output connectors and so on, for any more than they have to, to keep the manufacturing costs as low as possible ...

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

All of the processing power is in those two BGAs Jeff. They *are* the processors. One is a dedicated engine that runs the game (or plays a BluRay disc), as well as handling all the disc I/O - optical and hard - and internet / network access. On top of this, it manages all of the housekeeping tasks, so it's doing a lot of work, especially when it's actually running a game. Modern games have come a long way since the days of Doom. Most maintain a highly complex 3D 'reality' in which the game is set, and the gameplay takes place. Just consider for a moment, the highly complex calculations that have to go on, to work out how potentially many actions all at once, interact with the 3D model, and the knock-on effects that these might have on both the gameplay and the graphical environment. And remember that this is taking place in real time. The second BGA is a dedicated graphics engine. Again, consider how these games now look. Most are quite close to reality, and some scenes would have you hard pressed to tell if you were looking at a photo, or a piece of virtual reality. Given all that, just imagine the billions of calculations that are going on, again in real time, to work out the texturisation and surface rendering of all the visible objects, and how the light and shadows interact with those objects as they move within the scene. It really is mind-boggling just how sophisticated all of this is now. I can recall 25 years ago when I worked on high-end graphics systems, rendering the famous 3D conch shell image took a dedicated graphics terminal, hosted by a VAX mainframe, around 20 minutes. That's one image, not moving. Now think about a moving HD image in an HD background in real time. That's a LOT of processing power, needing a lot of amps to perform ...

The fan on these things *is* large, as is the heatsinking assembly, and when the processor finally decides to ramp the fan up, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. For this reason, at idle they tend to run it at below what I would consider a 'sensible' minimum, exacerbating the thermal stresses on the chips, their (lead-free) soldering, and the board to which they are attached.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

You sure that someone hadn't left their marshmallows in there?

Reply to
JW

That's a possibility. The 3402's did get hot enough under full load to roast them.

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Reply to
Meat Plow

"The size you would find on the line cord for a kettle" doesn't have much meaning in the US. :)

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

(...)

Thanks for the details. I really don't know anything about such dedicated game machines. I just assumed that all such machines used common processors to make development easier.

I found the Kill-o-watt meter and stuffed it in line with my Dell Optiplex 960 (E8500 3.2Ghz). 43 watts at idle, 70 watts max when playing a DVD (not including LCD monitor). Speedfan 4.40 says 31C for both CPU cores after about an hour. The one large fan is barely spinning and very quiet (which is why I bought this one). When I set the fan to run full speed, it's quite loud.

Well, theory suggests that the life of a semiconductor device is greatly affected by the number of thermal cycles it experiences (thermal fatigue). I don't know if this also applies to CPU's or whatever is in those BGA chips (FPGA/GPU?), but might be something else to worry about. I would guess(tm) that the large aluminum heat sink would moderate any abrupt changes in temperature, thus making it less of a concern. However, that might not be the case for the solder balls supporting the BGA.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Why is that ? You have electric kettles in your kitchens - I've used them. Or don't you call them kettles ?. OK, anyway, if it's a better description, the size of the round ground pin on a line cord that has a three pin plug. Is that more meaningful ? 3/16" diameter maybe ? 4mm ?

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

I've never seen one. Even Coffee pots are rare these days.

3/16" is between AWG 5 & AWG 4. 4 mm is between AWG 7 & AWG 6. How much current do those kettles draw?
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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Half what a US kettle would draw?

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Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Reply to
Meat Plow

A good British 240Vac kettle will take 3KW, yes 3KW. No waiting 10 minutes for the lousy thing to boil.

JC

Reply to
Archon

Typical UK kettle is 2 - 3kW so 8 to 12 amps or thereabouts. Now, I'm really confused that you say that you've never seen one. How do you boil water for a cup of tea, or a cup of instant coffee ? Whenever I come to Florida, I stay in a private rental home, and although some have had a kettle that heats from a ring on the cooker, I'm sure that I have also stayed in homes that had an electric version. Or maybe I'm mistaken on this ? Perhaps with your line power at only 110v at a non 3 phase outlet, the current levels are impractical with an element powerful enough to heat the water in short order. Here, every home - and I really mean *every home* - has one. It is a known problem for the electricity grid controllers, when TV ads come on in the middle of the popular soaps. Short term demand goes through the roof, as everyone rushes out to make a cup of tea or coffee, at the same time. The controllers genuinely have to know the advert schedules in the TV programmes, and factor this into their load shedding operations.

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

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