"Peter Hucker" wrote in message news:opsbh8amiiaiowgp@blue...
On 21 Jul 2004 13:21:24 -0700, do_not_spam_me wrote:

In the process of testing the water cooling, did you put a
temperature probe on each of the power components?

Transformer saturation is a big concern among power supply
designers, and heat makes them saturate at lower power
levels.

I checked the heatsink temperatures with my finger.

Did you measure the voltage on the heatsink before you did this, in
case it had 170VDC riding on it?

Didn't think anything else would need it.

Haven't you ever noticed how other transformers, including those
inside AC wall adapters, sometimes run very hot? Even the filter
inductors on the outputs of an ATX supply run so hot that temperature
sensors are sometimes mounted on them for fan speed vs. temperature
control or for thermal shutdown.

Kony wrote:

Nope, there are ZERO nice new fanless ones.
The highest quality, best specs and longest lasting PSU are all
actively cooled. Effective passive cooling for a modern system
will require such large passive 'sinks that it won't come near
fitting into a PS/2 size allocation per the PSU casing or system
chassis. Best attempt is when huge fins stick out the back of
system, but even then there is no chance PSU will last as long
unless quite specifically made with different spec and type
components inside, which none have been due to greater cost.

Some I saw said 3 year warranty :-)

I believe a test of one done by www.silentpcreview.com was not very
enthusiastic, probably because the company simply took the same basic
65-75% efficiency design that's been in PCs since 1980 and tried to
make it fanless by merely enlarging the heatsinks and adding more vent
holes. They should have instead raised the efficiency to around
85-90% because such supplies are common for non-PC purposes. The best
I've seen was 96%, but it was expensive.


Fans can be made almost silent by balancing them and mounting them on
shock absorbers. Balancing can be done by sticking a small piece of
copper or steel tape on the fan at the exact right location, but
finding that location can require patience, unless you build a strobe
light balancer. At the very least, have a fan that automatically
comes on if the temperature gets too hot. It won't make nearly as
much noise as 15 explosions.