people on another HN thread yesterday literally were bitching about the cost (not safety - cost) of a $1 adapter being "forced" on them by NVIDIA and now you want to tell them they're gonna have to buy a whole new PSU? that's gonna be quite the comment thread.
but yeah you're right in general, gotta move to 48V to move forward, pushing infinite amps at low voltages is completely bass-ackwards. The pcie-add-in-card form-factor needs a rethink in general, the GPU is now the largest and most power-hungry part of the system by far, and power isn't the only problem imposed by that ancient AT standard. imo we should move to some standardized "module sizes" for GPUs so that we solve GPU sag and cooling at the same time.
the "pcie card" of the future should be a 12x6x4" prismatic module that slides on rails into a socket that provides a PCIe edge connector as well as a XT90 jag (or similar) for power, at a defined physical location, with 48V. Airflow should happen in a defined direction and manner, whether that's axial flow or blower-style.
also please for the love of god, hot air rises, the AT standard means axial coolers are pushing against convection. But we couldn't even get BTX to take off, which is a trivial modification of ATX to reverse the orientation and fix this problem, the DIY market is deeply deeply rooted in the 1980s and will not abandon ATX without some nudging. Enterprise and OEM are fine, their volumes are big enough to do their own thing, but consumers are spinning their wheels fighting IBM's 1980 mistakes.
It's gonna take government intervention, the EU is gonna have to step in and do it like with USB-C cables. The mess of arbitrary card dimensions slowly growing larger over time is the exact same problem that we had pre-standardization with USB too.
You could have some standardization, a simple power negotiation protocol "I can supply 500W at 24V or 48V" and a standard (big) connector.
A long time ago the display was powered from the main unit, but we moved passed that and now displays have their own power cable.
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That was just switched A/C, so you didn't need to turn off two switches when you were done.
Way smaller than SFX PSUs and "gaming" laptop power bricks.
I haven't used it but from the outside it all appears very thoughtfully and competently engineered. His products have some of the highest TDP support (passive cases and his PSUs) on the passive HTPC market and the hifi aesthetic is great. I'd love to get an H5 or an H1 (although for a HTPC it'd be nice to have the H1.SODD - the H1.TODD doesn't look nearly as nice imo), don't really need it but the cat would love it.
Streacom does some interesting stuff too (like the DB4 cube case). Not quite as high TDPs and I don't like their body/fin aesthetic as much, but the DB4 is cool. And Akasa as well, love the galactico design.
Mini-box is the company that originated the picoPSU design and they do a fair bit of other miniature-computing stuff as well, including for the embedded automotive market. They have 18650 UPS modules for NUCs and other motherboards, shows up as a battery in the OS. The M350 case is also pretty nice for an on-the-desk type mini-pc, clearly to hit $50 you have to minimize costs but it's really the nicest $50 case that I've used in a long time (NZXT S340 non-elite got to $60 sometimes). The first picoPSU died within a day for no reason that I can tell but the second one has been fine, with the one caveat that the laptop brick is not low-noise at all. At one point I tried putting my PCs line-outs into an AV switcher and I was getting a groundloop and I could hear a bunch of noise. It was the M350/picopsu, when I unplugged it the other two PCs (including a dell laptop) were fine. Maybe not a typical use-case but it probably isn't the best choice for your SDR host or whatever lol. But HDPlex does have those linear regs...
It's super amusing that the 5700G (get the 5750G on ebay if you want ECC) is roughly as fast as my 9900K in most things but it does it at like 60W in a SFF case, can go even lower without much hit with eco mode. And it also can sorta game (in non-action stuff or older stuff). One night for fun I decided to play Team Fortress 2 at 3440x1440 on it, and it actually got a reasonably playable framerate... with a maxframes-config it would drop to around 30fps in teamfights but hey, returning to my roots playing it on my thinkpad w510/fx880m lol. I might have been able to push it farther with some res reduction but it was doing OK generally actually. It's also (again, roughly, haven't actually benchmarked) around the same speed as my 9900K in H264 encoding. The power scales very little past stock (at least during CPU workloads), just set it for silent and let it run, eco would probably be even better.
Tho if you threw 2 of these PSUs side by side in a laptop bag, they'd be noticably thinner than any MacBook charger (29mm vs 25mm) even though each one delivers >250% the power.
Smaller stuff that still reflects the "add-in-card" intention of the original design is fine, you can still have a bunch of PCIe slots for network cards and USB controllers if you want. But the GPU is not really an "add-in-card" anymore and it's problematic in a design sense to keep acting like it is, let alone to have every single product on the market doing something completely different dimensionally.
That's the "pre-USB-micro" era problem that USB faced.
There's no need for water though, that's a whole can of worms.
I am aware that modern gaming consoles are basically this but they make lot's of tradeoffs that a Desktop PC doesn't necessarily have to. Single Die GPU-CPU Combination for example. On the PC world you can reasonably pay twice as much and get twice the silicon for twice the performance, a tradeoff Consoles can't make.
and as for the server this could make essentially large 1U GPU racks possible by just having one big board per U with all the gpus in it.
In any case, I've always used the standard water cooling kits and they never failed me (as opposed to constantly breaking fans and huge temperatures). Maybe it's my environment.
I saw the connector and did a double take, it has a third row of smaller signal pins which none of my existing power supplies have. Not even my newest which is a 750W from last year. Sone new gpu power connector. So I assume most people had to buy a new psu anyway.
I am all for higher voltage. 24V is the standard in industrial automation as well as off highway machinery and european trucks. 48V is common in telco but positive ground though it is common in industry; I use 48v supplies for small stepper and servo motor amplifiers for motion control.
Were there high-end enthusiast-class BTX boards, comparable to the best ATX boards of the time? I don't recall seeing them in any numbers. Hell, even BTX cases from recognizable manufacturers are quite rare. It's obvious they were making the pitch to the largest OEMs, the Dells and Acers who can source their own cases and boards.
And the sales pitch was most compelling for them. If you've got a roasting Pentium 4 and a modest graphics card, you can fit them in the BTX "cooling channel" and keep them at a frosty 95c with a dinky heatsink and one or two cheap fans. That's not really exciting to an audience already saying "I can spend $75 on a kilogram of heatsink to get my CPU down to 70c, or $200+ on a custom-loop watercooling setup and get to 45c".
Maybe they needed to find a niche market for hobbyists to work with-- for example, the early "silent computing" crowd might have been more interested in marginal increases in cooling. After all, people are willing to consider other form factors when there's some compelling draw (see Mini-ITX)
I also wonder if the original design thesis still holds up. Once the Core series came out, "how do we cool this angry CPU" became less of a fixation, so it was probably easier to switch back towards commodity ATX designs. On the other hand, we've shot back past the original thermal situation and then some-- would the design still hold up with an unlimited 7950X drawing ~250W and a 4090 drawing 400w all trying to exhaust it into the cooling channel, or would they bake each other to death?
I do agree that today's GPUs are ridiculously long, and nonstandard designs make them difficult to manage. Given that most outward-facing drives are gone, and SSDs have replaced most spinning rust in enthusiast PCs, I wish we'd see more "flat desktop" style cases. The GPU isn't sagging because its weight is directed mostly straight down into the case's bracing, convection is probably a little better, but it doesn't really help the power nightmare. They always make the cheap photoshopped jokes about GPUs with mains power, but maybe that's a stopgap solution-- sell the 5090 with an external power brick supplying, say, 48V/12A, and there's no internal cable gore and the power system can be 48v everywhere it matters. Then there's no need to design the rest of the PSU to guess what nVidia will want tomorrow.
Power Supply Manufacturers and Board Manufactures can't still agree on this little step. 24V/48V is a bridge too far!
Same issue has been plaguing the automobile industry, they can't wait to move from 12V to 48V for their low voltage works, but who will bell the cat?
And in an entirely different area, 3D printing completed their transition from 12V to 24V some years ago, and currently there's an active push towards 48V.
I'm personally just looking forward to not spend a fortune on cables due to low voltages. It's frustratingly expensive to carry 12V a decent distance with some higher current draws.
My understanding is that actuators want to be operating at much higher voltages and that 100V-ish is the lowest they really want and that modern actuators would much prefer to be up at 200-400V.
At least we already have a standard for that: the very recent ATX12VO standard.
That would be a surprising move to be sure. I assume you mean low wattage?
Even before this issue, ATX 3.0 felt like a missed opportunity to start phasing in 48v DC power. Very disappointing.
Not entirely sure though as I've never built those.
However in the longer term it's probably time to start optimizing for power efficiency just like Intel did after the pentium 4. Cards can't keep increasing requirements in this day of energy crisis. And the climate problem insures it'll be like that for a long time.
600W out of 12V require 50 amps. This means you need more connectors, thicker cables and you have more resistive losses (= heat).
If you can get 48 V rails in, then you get down to a much comfier 12.5A, you can get that through comfortably on a pair of small-section wires.