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Ultra compact GAN ATX power supply delivers up to 250 Watts

318 points by zdw 4y ago

SergeAx 4y ago
Looks like the market niche is quite narrow for that. 250W is barely enough to power a desktop computer with onboard graphics. So compact office PCs it is?
rektide 4y ago
I was going to criticize & point out how usb-c chargers at and over 100W are just so small, but there's a photo comparing it to an iphone & ok, it looks adequately impressively dense! (I have a >2 year old 100W charger that is 66x64x30mm, this 250W unit is 170x50x25) It's been such a great synergy. Energy efficiency has been a concern already yes, but I really view usb-c chargers as pushing the consumerization & massification & development of this technology to the superb, common, un-exotic levels it's come down to. We just got tired of doing less good, actively explored trying to use a somewhat harder to drive switching semiconductor, & have reaped great rewards. Miniaturization mandated optimization & we all win. I really think the interchangable-parts/modularity & resulting competition that usb-c begot started this ball rolling. (Hoping USB-PD, with it's bump from 20 up to 48V, once again proves another huge win!)
- rektide 4y ago
  I'd also point to Google's Little Box Challenge[1] as an interesting data-point of yore. Little Box Challenge went the other direction: instead of taking AC and producing DC power, it was an inverter that took DC power and produced AC output. It had to output 2kW and be smaller than 655 cubic centimeters (cc's). The winning Red Electrical Devil's team got 3x more dense than this[2]! 240 cc's! While inverting 2kW of juice. Second place was 340ccs. I don't know whether we'd argue this DC->AC is harder/easier than an ATX supply (AC->DC) (probably not?) but this was quite an impressive competition, almost a decade ago, that resulted in probably some of the most power-dense, highest-efficiency power conversions that humanity has ever gotten up to. For compare, this 250W unit is 212cc's. 8x less power conversion, 88% the size. The Little Box Challenge designs were published, so there's a ton of great reading. Alas, Google frakking let the damned site bitrot off the net?! Sooo, head to archive.org[3] to read the team's writeups. From the winning CET Red Electric Devils writeup: > GaN transistors have many very interesting electrical characteristics (low Rds_on, low Qgate and Cds, ultra low Qrr); these create technological advantages over current MOSFET and IGBT devices (small size and low production costs). Unfortunately, they also have serious drawbacks due to their very fast switching characteristics: they are challenging to drive and require sensitive electromagnetic noise management. Another pitfall is the high voltage drop due to the reverse current when the GaN is turned off. The solution selected to overcome these difficulties is to control all the GaN transistors using soft switching for the entire operation range. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070215 (271 points, 8 years ago, 138 comments) [2] https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-little-box.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-li... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20171006105655/https://littleboxchallenge.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20171006105655/https://littleboxc...
  - elihu 4y ago
    I'm doing an EV conversion, and have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that a motor controller that weighs about ten pounds or so and isn't much bigger than a loaf of bread can handle about 100 kilowatts of power, converting DC at around 140-180 volts from the battery to 3-phase AC. And that's a relatively low-end inverter.
    - virginiadoolf 4y ago
      the answer is liquid cooling. these Little Box and ATX power supplies have to rely on passive cooling (radiative, conductive, and convective) which is generally proportional to surface area == physical size ^ 3. if you halve the size, then, you lose 87.5% of the surface area! that's why these things can't shrink as much. but ultimately the silicon involved is miniscule.
      - MauranKilom 4y ago
        Not to detract from your point, but surface area scales with size ^ 2.
      - elihu 4y ago
        Technically my motor controller can be passively cooled too, it's just not recommended. (It automatically goes into a low-power "limp" mode rather than burn itself out.) I'm not sure how much power it can handle continuously in a pure passive-cooling mode.
      - wolrah 4y ago
        It would also be worth noting that a typical EV doesn't have to run at anything close to 100% load for extended periods of time. What sort of power an electric drivetrain can handle for a burst of acceleration lasting a few seconds versus what that same drivetrain can handle as a continuous load are two very different things. The same even applies with combustion powered cars too, if you look at the pickup truck market you'll see massive power numbers on every manufacturer's diesel pickups. If you look at their chassis-cab commercial trucks those same diesel engines are often derated by 30-50% compared to the pickups even while being equipped with larger cooling systems. That's because the commercial variants are rated to perform to spec all day every day where the pickup version just needs to put a grin on the owner's face when they floor it off the line and then occasionally tow a boat or something.
- _delirium 4y ago
  I've found high-wattage USB-C chargers to have very poor reliability. All the 18-W chargers I've owned have lasted multiple years, but the compact 90-W+ chargers have a lifespan measured in months. Of course, they all purport to offer a warranty, but if you try to claim, they will not honor it. They will claim it's because you bought from Amazon and they don't warrant Amazon purchases (despite this being their main retail outlet, and the fact that they advertised the warranty IN the Amazon sales materials). Or something similar.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I have a ravpower, a hyper, and just bought the new ugreen. The ugreen is too new to judge, but the others have ran for over two years, and a good amount of that time has been outdoors in the sun. I constantly expect failures. This seems like an absurd task I'm putting them up to. But they are all still alive & doing the job. I've had a kill-a-watt so I can see their power consumption. A large amount of their life is spent ~60 watts, but there's definitely hours on end & heavy usage days, where they go up to or stay at 90+. My anecdotal data looks different than yours.
    - _delirium 4y ago
      My Ravpower device died within 8 months, and they refused to honor the warranty, giving as the reason that the purchaser of record was Amazon LLC, not Ravpower. Even though they advertised a warranty on their Amazon page, which was the main way they sold the devices.
      - retcon 4y ago
        ... dreams of the EPA obtaining warrants for the fraud on the public for the disposal costs of so much wasted electronics...
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        In the EU you get 2 years warranty for all items from every retailer by law, and most generally honour them.
- NavinF 4y ago
  > this 250W unit is 170x50x25 They’ve been selling a 400W (still fanless!) DC-DC version for years and it’s only 160x51.5x26mm : https://hdplex.com/hdplex-400w-hi-fi-dc-atx-power-supply-16v-24v-wide-range-voltage-input.html https://hdplex.com/hdplex-400w-hi-fi-dc-atx-power-supply-16v... I use it to power my CPU+mobo but I also have a couple of server PSUs further away to power my 3090 over several pairs of THNN. It’s far from a SFF build, but it can be totally silent.
  - morganvachon 4y ago
    The difference is that this unit does the AC-DC conversion inside itself, whereas your DC-DC power supply relies on an external AC-DC brick that is likely the same size as this entire self contained unit, if not larger.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      If you're dealing with solar or a vehicle you may already have DC available; too bad it can't take -48v which some racks still supply.
  - dwild 4y ago
    To be a fair comparison would need to include the AC-DC power supply that you keep outside to power that thing... it's double the size once you account for that.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      More like 3x. My Emerson 7001484-J000 PSUs go full depth into a server chassis. But that’s a sunk cost since it’s much easier to build a 12VDC UPS instead of a 120/240VAC UPS
- jsmith45 4y ago
  I my complaint that they are calling this atx, when the only thing remotely ATX about it is being designed to work with the atx motherboard power connector. This in no way meets the atx form factor for power supplies, neither the original, nor the 12V version. Like I could forgive it if it failed to be a rectangular prism in favor of having more open space, as long as it had a frame with proper mounting points. And I could also forgive it if they went with the rectangle, but far shorter than the official 140mm depth (that has always been mandatory per intel specs), given that the market already accommodates non-conforming lengths, and this could be made to not require the bottom of case mounting holes, allowing for absurdly short lengths. But the photos show none of that, and just a fully custom form factor, without any apparent mounting mechanism.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    This actually looks like a server psu.
  - tomtheelder 4y ago
    The form factor and mounting design of the power supply are not parts of the ATX spec. The pin layout & shape, voltages, signaling, etc are what are specified. This is an ATX power supply. It is just designed for very small cases that would never be able to accommodate the existing standard configurations.
    - D13Fd 4y ago
      >The form factor and mounting design of the power supply are not parts of the ATX spec. The pin layout & shape, voltages, signaling, etc are what are specified. Did you just pull this out of nowhere? Look at ATX Specification v. 2.01 section 4.1, page 18-20. It specifies the "required overall dimensions and general form factor of an ATX power supply," with or without special airflow ducting (emphasis in original). The linked PSU in the OP clearly does not meet this form factor.
      - tomtheelder 4y ago
        That's a very outdated spec. The size requirements were removed in the current spec.
- hangonhn 4y ago
  > (Hoping USB-PD, with it's bump from 20 up to 48V, once again proves another huge win!) Can someone explain to me why 48V? Is there something special with 48V or beyond? The reason I ask is because some cars now have electric turbos and the manufacturer had to switch to a 48V system. Just curious what the benefits of higher voltage is and if 48 is somehow special. Thanks in advance.
  - aparks517 4y ago
    Power is the product of current and voltage. To transfer much power at a low voltage requires a large current. Supporting a large current without getting hot and melting requires large-diameter wire. Other components may also be bulky or expensive if they have high current-handling requirements. I seem to recall that somewhere around 50 volts is a magic number from a safety/regulatory perspective. It might also have something to do with semiconductor breakdown voltage, but maybe I'm out of date on that.
  - Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
    My understanding is that 50V is the established threshold above which safety to humans starts to be a factor. So, applications that want high powers, without the penalty of large wires nor the penalty of the safety requirements of an HV system, converge to 48.
    - avhon1 4y ago
      > the established threshold above which safety to humans starts to be a factor Specifically, 50 volts is approximately the threshold above which electricity can pass through the skin and shock you. Lower voltages will only shock humans if they have a way to bypass some of the skin, like wounds or tight-fitting metal jewelry. Otherwise, the resistance of skin is high enough to prevent the flow of electricity. That's why you can touch both terminals of a 12V car battery at the same time and almost certainly not be shocked.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    At 48v you can use much smaller gauge wire than at 12v. Which means lower cost, less weight and a smaller footprint for your wire harnesses. One of the things that can “get you” with these higher voltage systems is you can’t use them to jumpstart the present majority of cars. While I’ve yet to actually see a higher voltage car, I would hope they’d put warnings by the battery to remind the user that “hey, don’t try to jumpstart your friends car with this battery!”
deleted 4y ago
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Nursie 4y ago
So about quarter the size of a standard SFX PSU, which is pretty cool. But also about a quarter the power the 'biggest' ones can provide. I can see this being really good for (for instance) boxes like my fileserver which has a 65W TDP i3 in it and a bunch of SSDs, or compact media boxes that just have a processor and iGPU. Unfortunately the way things are going in the world of PCs, you aren't going to power much of a modern dGPU from that.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The example showing two linked together for 500w was interesting. This would allow more compact or oddly shaped desktops.
javajosh 4y ago
The cables are bigger than the PSU. Has anyone ever experimented with putting edge connectors on a motherboard PCB for power? And edge connector for PCI and memory and m.2? In this way you could build out a very flat PC with commodity parts, since all the components would be parallel to each other and the motherboard.
- jonah-archive 4y ago
  The SGI O2 was built like this (power & all bus connections were off an edge connector), some good pics of the mobo at: https://bukosek.si/hardware/collection/sgi-o2.html#pics https://bukosek.si/hardware/collection/sgi-o2.html#pics
- kayson 4y ago
  Dell PowerEdge Servers do this. And they have 1.1kW PSUs!!
  - mrb 4y ago
    Indeed. Edge connectors are common on servers with hot-swappable PSUs.
  - unwind 4y ago
    Wow, didn't know they thought it was important enough of a feature to put it in the name of the product. :)
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
  You should look at CRPS form factor power supplies, they have the edge connector you are referring to. ATX12VO also addresses the large legacy ATX connector.
- jabl 4y ago
  Wasn't there some upcoming PSU spec that dropped the 5 and 3.3V rails leaving only 12V? What happened to that? Edit: Yes, the "ATX12VO" spec.
  - 4y ago
noobermin 4y ago
I hate to be the one but a) this means fixing these psu's are going to be even harder now and b) at some point people are going to have to worry about energy intensity (W/m^2) exceeding values where the devices themselves will melt. That said, interesting tech. It feels like a lot of new tech news these days is just furthering gimmicks (adding "blockchain" to this or ML applied to something that didn't need it) but this is actually cool and could open a host of new applications.
- csours 4y ago
  Do people fix PSUs?
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Yes?????????
    - nwiswell 4y ago
      Awesome! I've got about a hundred server power supplies that need fixing, what do you charge?
      - justahuman74 4y ago
        Too much. You fix a PSU cause you know what you're doing and have the time, not because it's economical to do for someone else
        nwiswell 4y ago
        Hmm! It certainly seems like if it's worthwhile for anyone to do with unspecialized labor, then it would certainly be worth doing for a specialist. Why is it that I've never heard of a power supply repair technician in a data center?
        tinco 4y ago
genewitch 4y ago
$145 is pretty steep, and I'd like to see the Vpp (also called ripple) before considering this. I currently use picoPSU (ASIN B005TWE5E6), 50W and 80W versions to power 7th and 8th gen atoms and celerons. I use a "UPS" style 12VDC PSU connected to a fairly large sealed lead acid battery - about 4x the volume of a standard UPS battery. As far as my measurements go with the induced noise from the PSU for radio reception work, it seems to work pretty good. I've looked at using SBCs instead, but you're never really going to get away from buck/boost on boards, since some things need 3.3 or less volts (memory, etc). The picoPSU also have survived for years up in elevator attics with all of the machinery and dust. never had an outage caused by the picoPSU or the attached 12V UPS stuff. I wonder if it is possible to run more than one board off the same PSU. I know you can run a board off multiple PSUs, but is the inverse true? If i ever get a new batch of these 25W TDP computers racked, having 2 of these connected to two UPS and 6 computers might be cool. It's just the ATX connector that needs population, i use NVME whenever possible, no GPU, no cards, just USB and ethernet onboard.
- rektide 4y ago
  > I wonder if it is possible to run more than one board off the same PSU. Absolutely. There's something I can't remember about signal lines that need to be set up, but yet, people have been running multiple computers off as single supply for a long long long time now. Also worth warning people ahead of time, it's hard to predict what kind of specific power consumption a motherboard will have. There's so many power rails going in. 3.3V, 5V, 12V, -3.3V... Making sure that each rail is adequately rated for additional motherboards can be a challenge. Ideally one would test each supply line, one by one, to try & figure things out, & compare against rated specs of the power supply. Intel's been pushing a new spec called ATX12VO, short for 12-volts-only, which does away with all the other rails & has the motherboard expect 12v. This would make it much easier to understand what power consumption is. I do seem to recall some of the new ATX specs (3.0?) also kind of expect power-consumers to declare how much power they expect to use, as a safety/planning feature, which could complicate this one easy-to-do hack (unless there's some way for the additional motherboard/motherboards to also declare their power draw). This might only be ATX3.0's new 12VHPWR connector, which works alongside PCIe 5.0-- not sure if it also impacts motherboards or not.
bradlys 4y ago
Here’s to hoping for titanium rated power supplies becoming the norm like GaN chargers - and for a reasonable price!
causality0 4y ago
Is it just me or are the size benefits of GaN power supplies overblown? The 100w GaN type-c charger for my new laptop is less than ten percent lighter than the 100w charger for my decade-old Dell, while being six times more expensive to replace.
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  Isn’t it a lot smaller (not lighter) though? I think the main benefits are size and efficiency, not weight.
  - causality0 4y ago
    It might be about thirty percent smaller by volume. It's not any more convenient to carry around because instead of being a candy bar shape it's perfectly square and actually wider than the old one. While not related to it being a GaN charger, it being a permanently attached type-c connector is a recipe for disaster considering how much more delicate it is than a traditional laptop charger. I'm probably going back to a ThinkPad for my next laptop and the charger connector is not an insignificant reason why.
ParksNet 4y ago
We need a new ATX standard with external power bricks and smaller components. Giant ATX cases are unnecessarily huge, but laptops are too small and noisy. There's not much of a middle ground.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Mini-ITX?
- toast0 4y ago
  Like another poster said, Mini-ITX can be fairly small; I've got some 3.3L cases (includes a 150W power supply). My case has room for a 2.5" drive and a laptop optical drive (kind of, there's a related model that has an opening for the optical drive, mine just has the mounting place for it), you could get a smidge smaller if you omit that. There are smaller cases especially if you have and don't count an external power supply. If you do MicroATX including a MicroATX case, that's meaningfully smaller than ATX but there's no price premium. If you want to get smaller, the CPU coolers are the tricky bit, and I'm assuming you're ok with integrated graphics, GPUs and their coolers are pretty immense as well.
- saxonww 4y ago
  There's plenty of middle ground. In terms of size, you have Mini ITX as pointed out by another comment, and there's MicroATX which is perhaps more common than regular ATX. And of course there are several mini systems like the Mac Mini, Intel NUC series, and derivatives/copies of the NUC. There are a lot of case options for small Mini ITX systems, I'm using an NCase M1 which is a 12-13L by volume case. There are smaller cases, but the smaller the case, the less flexible it is with configurations, which is one reason they large ATX cases are still popular; it seems like a lot of enthusiasts like clear side panels and rgb light shows and so forth, and a tiny case isn't as exciting. There are also multiple PSU size options. The NCase M1 I mentioned can use a regular ATX PS, but an SFX power supply fits better; SFX seems like maybe half the volume of a regular ATX PS. There is also SFX-L, which is a bit bigger so it can house a larger fan. These smaller PS standards are typically lower power, although you can get 650W+ SFX supplies now I think. Silverstone and Corsair were regarded as having the best SFX supplies last time I was looking. Finally, there are a couple of options for external power bricks like you suggest. As mentioned elsewhere there is a PicoPSU which is a DC/DC converter the size of a 24 pin ATX socket. It just plugs into the ATX socket on any regular ATX-compatible motherboard and has some cables attached to the sides for peripherals. There's also the 'Thin Mini-ITX' standard, which is I think intended for digital signage and industrial stuff, but if your requirements are modest you can use these for a desktop also. They integrate a DC/DC converter and use a 19V laptop ac adapter. The ones I've seen are best suited to on-chip graphics and m.2/msata drives, though.
divbzero 4y ago
s/GAN/GaN/ GAN [1] happens to be a machine learning construct. 250 W of electrical output would be rather surprising. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
- paulmd 4y ago
  scoff all you want, this was the plot of The Matrix! (the original script was written with the sensible "using humans as a biological computer" angle but they worried audiences wouldn't get that newfangled computer thing in the basically prehistoric year of 1999, so they changed it to be humans generating power which... isn't how thermodynamics works!)
  - spartanatreyu 4y ago
    This really adds more to the encounter between Neo and The Architect. > Neo: "You won't do it, you need humans to survive." > The Architect (phrased angrily and bitterly) "There are some levels of survival we are prepared to accept."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You could have combined it with Idiocracy - all the people in the Matrix act slow and dumb because most of their brainpower is being used to run weather simulations or whatever you'd do with a world-wide supercomputer.
  - prutschman 4y ago
    "But that's crazy, Morpheus. Thermodynamics says.." "And where did you learn about physics, Neo?" "..... In the Matrix...."
    - paulmd 4y ago
      I upvoted at the time but I just wanted to mention that I've scrolled through my comments/replies a few times and I've been chuckling every time I read it. ;) been kind of a crappy couple weeks for me due to family illnesses and it did bring a smile to my face. feels like a "the matrix has you" sketch from the flash player days...
Ayesh 4y ago
I have a laptop that draws 240W over a square slim tip, and recently saw a 240W GaN power brick. Like the photo in the article, it's comparable to an iPhone in size, but what prevented me from buying it was the weight (400g) and the price ($155 IIRC). I think the sweet spot of GaN is in wall adapters that deliver 18-45W over USB-A/C for mobile devices rather than PSUs where the size/weight doesn't matter as much.
- TruthWillHurt 4y ago
  I actually have a 100W GaN charger for my 100W Razer Stealth 13''. Super compact and great for travel. The new Razer models actually come with the GaN charger included!
walrus01 4y ago
GaN stuff is also used in the smallest and highest power compact tx power amplifiers in the rf chain for the buc/sspa on two way geostationary satellite terminals now. Some of the BUCs now are 1/3 the size of 12 years ago. Other small and dense terrestrial microwave and millimeter wave things use gan power amps too.
Dunedan 4y ago
The website of the manufacturer provides more information and more photos: https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html
ericbarrett 4y ago
94% efficient! When I started building PCs it was common to see 60-75% if you weren't inside a very narrow window of optimum load. It's mind-blowing how efficient electronics have become. Also < 0.4W idle. Wow.
- zokier 4y ago
  "80 Plus Gold" rating already required up to 92% efficiency, so 94% isn't that groundbreaking. Here is one random example from 5y ago that hits 94-96% efficiency https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime-titanium-power-supply-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime-tita...
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    I disagree, 92 -> 94% is a 25% reduction in waste!
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      At 100W load, it's a 2.3W reduction is waste. If it's on 24/7 that's about 20kWh over a year, or just shy of charging my old Nissan Leaf once. Then again, 20kWh here, 20kWh there, it adds up.
aix1 4y ago
Could someone ELI5 what makes GaN PSUs/chargers more efficient than earlier technologies?
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  It is not so much about efficency but about size. Galliumnitride generates less heat than silicon, so you can make much smaller power supplies.
  - Doxin 4y ago
    If I recall correctly GaN transistors also just generally are better in a lot of metrics. Faster switch times, Lower resistance, Higher permissible voltages, etc. It really does look like a miracle technology.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      Are they good for logic (CPUs, GPUs etc) as well or just for power applications?
      - namibj 4y ago
        In theory, but they are hard to miniaturize for logic ICs.
      - kf7njh 4y ago
        I would argue probably not. GaN has a higher bandgap voltage (3eV iirc... 1eV for Silicon), which means a CPU would need to be run at a higher voltage. As a quick rule of thumb for huge transistor count ICs: Power (heat) = freq*Voltage^2 I won't go into detail, but you can see how for a CPU designer decreasing voltage is critical to increasing speed. Remember a decade ago when CPUs were like 1.2V and we hit this ~3GHz "wall"? But now due to breakthroughs in process nodes, CPUs are running I think ~0.8V but boosting up to 5GHz. If we make the same CPU on a GaN process, the transistors would probably need ~3V to switch, and thus need to be run about 9x slower to meet the same package power (or I guess you could run it at the same speed but then try and figure out how to cool a 9x higher TDP CPU). Furthermore, GaN is difficult to manufacture into a monocrystaline perfect lattice compared to Silicon. You can image that for modern 7nm/5nm nodes, where there are sometimes angstroms of distance in a transistor, having a foundation full of defects can be devastating to the yield. Power electronics is a totally different domain with different challenges. In this area GaN excels, but for ICs I don't think it makes sense. Let's see in 20 years though. GaN is relatively new compared to Silicon and might just need some further refinement. Just my 2c though. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
torginus 4y ago
I think the chief limitation here is the ATX standard itself. Modern devices could make do with a single 12V rail (especially at this wattage), that would reduce the cabling and simplify the PSU circuitry as well. A lot of prebuilt OEMs and consoles and not to mention laptops already use this approach.
- PossiblyKyle 4y ago
  On one hand, I definitely agree. On the other, my issue is that motherboards are already one of the least reliable components in your PC, and introducing even more complications to them just makes the situation (and the cost of replacement) worse
  - bradfa 4y ago
    Going to only 12V power to the motherboard doesn't actually make them much more complicated, or any more complicated really. Like half of a modern motherboard design today is just power supplies anyways, as all CPUs will do voltage scaling to save power. It's not like your CPU takes 3.3V input directly, most are running in the 0.8-1.5V range, even DDR4 is 1.2V, and the CPU is the majority of the consumption on the actual motherboard (high power graphics cards usually have their own 12V input connector, the PCIe edge cannot transfer enough).
    - dicknuckle 4y ago
      I expect motherboards could be more reliable if there was a standard 12v to 5v, 3.3v, 1.5v etc pluggable converter that they all used. It could cut down on E waste. Instead of having to discard an entire motherboard, the low voltage converter board could be swapped out and repaired/discarded. The same companies that make ATX power supplies could also make the discreet low voltage converters. ATX innards could be smaller, less wiring between components. No that's silly, we should continue to use a design from 1995, itself replacing a design from 1981.
      - bradfa 4y ago
nimish 4y ago
Could be denser. Instead of a big passive EMI filter, use an active one (noise cancelling, essentially). It's a little baffling why they aren't more widely used, they aren't that complicated. https://u.dianyuan.com/bbs/u/17/1086016427.pdf https://u.dianyuan.com/bbs/u/17/1086016427.pdf is an example. It's almost comically simple: connect a current sensor, a high-pass filter, and an opamp controlling a transistor. With some thought it could probably be cut down even more. I think TI has integrated this into their controllers already.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Consumer electronics are just so hilariously bleak. Why use the smart option when a cheap one almost does the job too? That would be overengineering and everyone can do that! Only the smartest engineers know how to deliver maximum value to shareholders while offloading the maximum possible externalities! Sorry, pet peeve of mine.
  - nimish 4y ago
    Yeah it's really disappointing that even in high cost consumer electronics there's very little incentive to innovate in non-sexy areas :(
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Is the passive one more reliable, less to go wrong?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nimish 4y ago
    Well the big electrolytic caps you need for the passive filters are infamously unreliable which is why you see everyone trumpeting their "Japanese" brand capacitors which are supposed to be better. The caps you need for the active filter are the tiny solid ceramic ones that are basically bulletproof except in high vibration environments. The ICs needed are similar.
londons_explore 4y ago
The littlebox challenge back in 2014 required 3 watts/cm^3 to compete... This 'ultra compqct' only offers 1.18 watts/cm^3 in 2022. While this might be the best on the market, it is far from what is technically possible.
- tecleandor 4y ago
  But that was an inverter, so DC --> AC. But also, I don't know if that really makes a difference :P
londons_explore 4y ago
This supply goes to quite some effort to have a good power factor and filter harmonics sent to the grid... But why? Grid operators typically have laws in place saying how many harmonics you're allowed to inject, and for stuff under a few kilowatts it's totally fine to just have a bridge rectifier straight to a capacitor. That's what every other electronic device in your house will do. If you're making a high efficiency power supply, you'd probably want that to be a synchronous rectifier to get 1% or so more efficiency, but it would still only be drawing current on the peaks of the sine wave. But I don't see why you'd want to go to much effort to make your current draw a nice sine wave rather than a series of peak-chopping spikes. Is it to save money on copper in the power supply wire perhaps?
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  > and for stuff under a few kilowatts it's totally fine to just have a bridge rectifier straight to a capacitor. That's what every other electronic device in your house will do. The EMC Directive mandates compliance with IEC 61000-3-2 which certainly requires you to do a little bit more than hook up a bridge rectifier to the grid.
zasdffaa 4y ago
Could an EE comment on the safety of this.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Not an EE, but it's a consumer product sold through non-shady channels, so it's presumably very safe.
aasasd 4y ago
Difficult to imagine the size from a photo with a phone (maybe it's due to me being a user of Android, idk). I'd prefer to see it next to previous small power supplies—because I'm vaguely sure I've seen some of comparable size and wattage for NASes, and my shopping for them was ten years ago. However, this one is likely considerably slimmer in height.
- hnuser123456 4y ago
  1x2x7 inches
- kraftman 4y ago
  Theres a comparison here vs other standard PSU sizes: https://hdplex.com/pub/media/image/Product/250WGaN/overview/HDPLEX.250W.GAN.Size1.jpg https://hdplex.com/pub/media/image/Product/250WGaN/overview/...
  - aasasd 4y ago
    Ah, indeed I should've taken a look at the manufacturer site. However, I'm pretty sure that there is a format narrower than FlexATX from the picture — because I was thinking of buying a PSU like that for a petite NAS. (Until I learned that there are small, silent and cool external PSUs, similar to ones for laptops.)
Jaruzel 4y ago
Looking at this, makes me wish (again!) that there was a globally agreed colour scheme for Live/Neutral/Earth wiring....
- deepsun 4y ago
  I always thought Neutral is White, Earth is Black, and Live is everything else (like Red).
  - Jaruzel 4y ago
    Here in the UK, Neutral is blue, Earth is Yellow & Green striped, and Live is Brown. Unless... the wiring is over ~30 years old, in which case it's Black + Red for Neutral and Live.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Yellow & Green striped is the IEC standard for earth here in Europe AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60446#Protective_earth_and_neutral_(PEN)_conductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60446#Protective_earth_and...
  - jbotdev 4y ago
    In the US it’s White for Neutral, Green for Ground, Black for Hot, Red also Hot (usually for the other hot/phase on 240v or three way lighting).
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    As usual there's the American way and the International way.
    - deepsun 4y ago
      Stop dividing people! I'm International, by the way :)

318 points by zdw 4y ago

Looks like the market niche is quite narrow for that. 250W is barely enough to power a desktop computer with onboard graphics. So compact office PCs it is?

rektide 4y ago

I was going to criticize & point out how usb-c chargers at and over 100W are just so small, but there's a photo comparing it to an iphone & ok, it looks adequately impressively dense! (I have a >2 year old 100W charger that is 66x64x30mm, this 250W unit is 170x50x25) It's been such a great synergy. Energy efficiency has been a concern already yes, but I really view usb-c chargers as pushing the consumerization & massification & development of this technology to the superb, common, un-exotic levels it's come down to. We just got tired of doing less good, actively explored trying to use a somewhat harder to drive switching semiconductor, & have reaped great rewards. Miniaturization mandated optimization & we all win. I really think the interchangable-parts/modularity & resulting competition that usb-c begot started this ball rolling. (Hoping USB-PD, with it's bump from 20 up to 48V, once again proves another huge win!)

rektide 4y ago
I'd also point to Google's Little Box Challenge[1] as an interesting data-point of yore. Little Box Challenge went the other direction: instead of taking AC and producing DC power, it was an inverter that took DC power and produced AC output. It had to output 2kW and be smaller than 655 cubic centimeters (cc's). The winning Red Electrical Devil's team got 3x more dense than this[2]! 240 cc's! While inverting 2kW of juice. Second place was 340ccs. I don't know whether we'd argue this DC->AC is harder/easier than an ATX supply (AC->DC) (probably not?) but this was quite an impressive competition, almost a decade ago, that resulted in probably some of the most power-dense, highest-efficiency power conversions that humanity has ever gotten up to. For compare, this 250W unit is 212cc's. 8x less power conversion, 88% the size. The Little Box Challenge designs were published, so there's a ton of great reading. Alas, Google frakking let the damned site bitrot off the net?! Sooo, head to archive.org[3] to read the team's writeups. From the winning CET Red Electric Devils writeup: > GaN transistors have many very interesting electrical characteristics (low Rds_on, low Qgate and Cds, ultra low Qrr); these create technological advantages over current MOSFET and IGBT devices (small size and low production costs). Unfortunately, they also have serious drawbacks due to their very fast switching characteristics: they are challenging to drive and require sensitive electromagnetic noise management. Another pitfall is the high voltage drop due to the reverse current when the GaN is turned off. The solution selected to overcome these difficulties is to control all the GaN transistors using soft switching for the entire operation range. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070215 (271 points, 8 years ago, 138 comments) [2] https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-little-box.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/02/and-winner-of-1-million-li... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20171006105655/https://littleboxchallenge.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20171006105655/https://littleboxc...
- elihu 4y ago
  I'm doing an EV conversion, and have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that a motor controller that weighs about ten pounds or so and isn't much bigger than a loaf of bread can handle about 100 kilowatts of power, converting DC at around 140-180 volts from the battery to 3-phase AC. And that's a relatively low-end inverter.
  - virginiadoolf 4y ago
    the answer is liquid cooling. these Little Box and ATX power supplies have to rely on passive cooling (radiative, conductive, and convective) which is generally proportional to surface area == physical size ^ 3. if you halve the size, then, you lose 87.5% of the surface area! that's why these things can't shrink as much. but ultimately the silicon involved is miniscule.
    - MauranKilom 4y ago
      Not to detract from your point, but surface area scales with size ^ 2.
    - elihu 4y ago
      Technically my motor controller can be passively cooled too, it's just not recommended. (It automatically goes into a low-power "limp" mode rather than burn itself out.) I'm not sure how much power it can handle continuously in a pure passive-cooling mode.
    - wolrah 4y ago
      It would also be worth noting that a typical EV doesn't have to run at anything close to 100% load for extended periods of time. What sort of power an electric drivetrain can handle for a burst of acceleration lasting a few seconds versus what that same drivetrain can handle as a continuous load are two very different things. The same even applies with combustion powered cars too, if you look at the pickup truck market you'll see massive power numbers on every manufacturer's diesel pickups. If you look at their chassis-cab commercial trucks those same diesel engines are often derated by 30-50% compared to the pickups even while being equipped with larger cooling systems. That's because the commercial variants are rated to perform to spec all day every day where the pickup version just needs to put a grin on the owner's face when they floor it off the line and then occasionally tow a boat or something.
_delirium 4y ago
I've found high-wattage USB-C chargers to have very poor reliability. All the 18-W chargers I've owned have lasted multiple years, but the compact 90-W+ chargers have a lifespan measured in months. Of course, they all purport to offer a warranty, but if you try to claim, they will not honor it. They will claim it's because you bought from Amazon and they don't warrant Amazon purchases (despite this being their main retail outlet, and the fact that they advertised the warranty IN the Amazon sales materials). Or something similar.
- rektide 4y ago
  I have a ravpower, a hyper, and just bought the new ugreen. The ugreen is too new to judge, but the others have ran for over two years, and a good amount of that time has been outdoors in the sun. I constantly expect failures. This seems like an absurd task I'm putting them up to. But they are all still alive & doing the job. I've had a kill-a-watt so I can see their power consumption. A large amount of their life is spent ~60 watts, but there's definitely hours on end & heavy usage days, where they go up to or stay at 90+. My anecdotal data looks different than yours.
  - _delirium 4y ago
    My Ravpower device died within 8 months, and they refused to honor the warranty, giving as the reason that the purchaser of record was Amazon LLC, not Ravpower. Even though they advertised a warranty on their Amazon page, which was the main way they sold the devices.
    - retcon 4y ago
      ... dreams of the EPA obtaining warrants for the fraud on the public for the disposal costs of so much wasted electronics...
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      In the EU you get 2 years warranty for all items from every retailer by law, and most generally honour them.
NavinF 4y ago
> this 250W unit is 170x50x25 They’ve been selling a 400W (still fanless!) DC-DC version for years and it’s only 160x51.5x26mm : https://hdplex.com/hdplex-400w-hi-fi-dc-atx-power-supply-16v-24v-wide-range-voltage-input.html https://hdplex.com/hdplex-400w-hi-fi-dc-atx-power-supply-16v... I use it to power my CPU+mobo but I also have a couple of server PSUs further away to power my 3090 over several pairs of THNN. It’s far from a SFF build, but it can be totally silent.
- morganvachon 4y ago
  The difference is that this unit does the AC-DC conversion inside itself, whereas your DC-DC power supply relies on an external AC-DC brick that is likely the same size as this entire self contained unit, if not larger.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If you're dealing with solar or a vehicle you may already have DC available; too bad it can't take -48v which some racks still supply.
- dwild 4y ago
  To be a fair comparison would need to include the AC-DC power supply that you keep outside to power that thing... it's double the size once you account for that.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    More like 3x. My Emerson 7001484-J000 PSUs go full depth into a server chassis. But that’s a sunk cost since it’s much easier to build a 12VDC UPS instead of a 120/240VAC UPS
jsmith45 4y ago
I my complaint that they are calling this atx, when the only thing remotely ATX about it is being designed to work with the atx motherboard power connector. This in no way meets the atx form factor for power supplies, neither the original, nor the 12V version. Like I could forgive it if it failed to be a rectangular prism in favor of having more open space, as long as it had a frame with proper mounting points. And I could also forgive it if they went with the rectangle, but far shorter than the official 140mm depth (that has always been mandatory per intel specs), given that the market already accommodates non-conforming lengths, and this could be made to not require the bottom of case mounting holes, allowing for absurdly short lengths. But the photos show none of that, and just a fully custom form factor, without any apparent mounting mechanism.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  This actually looks like a server psu.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  The form factor and mounting design of the power supply are not parts of the ATX spec. The pin layout & shape, voltages, signaling, etc are what are specified. This is an ATX power supply. It is just designed for very small cases that would never be able to accommodate the existing standard configurations.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    >The form factor and mounting design of the power supply are not parts of the ATX spec. The pin layout & shape, voltages, signaling, etc are what are specified. Did you just pull this out of nowhere? Look at ATX Specification v. 2.01 section 4.1, page 18-20. It specifies the "required overall dimensions and general form factor of an ATX power supply," with or without special airflow ducting (emphasis in original). The linked PSU in the OP clearly does not meet this form factor.
    - tomtheelder 4y ago
      That's a very outdated spec. The size requirements were removed in the current spec.
hangonhn 4y ago
> (Hoping USB-PD, with it's bump from 20 up to 48V, once again proves another huge win!) Can someone explain to me why 48V? Is there something special with 48V or beyond? The reason I ask is because some cars now have electric turbos and the manufacturer had to switch to a 48V system. Just curious what the benefits of higher voltage is and if 48 is somehow special. Thanks in advance.
- aparks517 4y ago
  Power is the product of current and voltage. To transfer much power at a low voltage requires a large current. Supporting a large current without getting hot and melting requires large-diameter wire. Other components may also be bulky or expensive if they have high current-handling requirements. I seem to recall that somewhere around 50 volts is a magic number from a safety/regulatory perspective. It might also have something to do with semiconductor breakdown voltage, but maybe I'm out of date on that.
- Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
  My understanding is that 50V is the established threshold above which safety to humans starts to be a factor. So, applications that want high powers, without the penalty of large wires nor the penalty of the safety requirements of an HV system, converge to 48.
  - avhon1 4y ago
    > the established threshold above which safety to humans starts to be a factor Specifically, 50 volts is approximately the threshold above which electricity can pass through the skin and shock you. Lower voltages will only shock humans if they have a way to bypass some of the skin, like wounds or tight-fitting metal jewelry. Otherwise, the resistance of skin is high enough to prevent the flow of electricity. That's why you can touch both terminals of a 12V car battery at the same time and almost certainly not be shocked.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  At 48v you can use much smaller gauge wire than at 12v. Which means lower cost, less weight and a smaller footprint for your wire harnesses. One of the things that can “get you” with these higher voltage systems is you can’t use them to jumpstart the present majority of cars. While I’ve yet to actually see a higher voltage car, I would hope they’d put warnings by the battery to remind the user that “hey, don’t try to jumpstart your friends car with this battery!”

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Nursie 4y ago

So about quarter the size of a standard SFX PSU, which is pretty cool. But also about a quarter the power the 'biggest' ones can provide. I can see this being really good for (for instance) boxes like my fileserver which has a 65W TDP i3 in it and a bunch of SSDs, or compact media boxes that just have a processor and iGPU. Unfortunately the way things are going in the world of PCs, you aren't going to power much of a modern dGPU from that.

Gigachad 4y ago
The example showing two linked together for 500w was interesting. This would allow more compact or oddly shaped desktops.

javajosh 4y ago

The cables are bigger than the PSU. Has anyone ever experimented with putting edge connectors on a motherboard PCB for power? And edge connector for PCI and memory and m.2? In this way you could build out a very flat PC with commodity parts, since all the components would be parallel to each other and the motherboard.

jonah-archive 4y ago
The SGI O2 was built like this (power & all bus connections were off an edge connector), some good pics of the mobo at: https://bukosek.si/hardware/collection/sgi-o2.html#pics https://bukosek.si/hardware/collection/sgi-o2.html#pics
kayson 4y ago
Dell PowerEdge Servers do this. And they have 1.1kW PSUs!!
- mrb 4y ago
  Indeed. Edge connectors are common on servers with hot-swappable PSUs.
- unwind 4y ago
  Wow, didn't know they thought it was important enough of a feature to put it in the name of the product. :)
c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
You should look at CRPS form factor power supplies, they have the edge connector you are referring to. ATX12VO also addresses the large legacy ATX connector.
jabl 4y ago
Wasn't there some upcoming PSU spec that dropped the 5 and 3.3V rails leaving only 12V? What happened to that? Edit: Yes, the "ATX12VO" spec.
- 4y ago

noobermin 4y ago

I hate to be the one but a) this means fixing these psu's are going to be even harder now and b) at some point people are going to have to worry about energy intensity (W/m^2) exceeding values where the devices themselves will melt. That said, interesting tech. It feels like a lot of new tech news these days is just furthering gimmicks (adding "blockchain" to this or ML applied to something that didn't need it) but this is actually cool and could open a host of new applications.

csours 4y ago
Do people fix PSUs?
- noobermin 4y ago
  Yes?????????
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    Awesome! I've got about a hundred server power supplies that need fixing, what do you charge?
    - justahuman74 4y ago
      Too much. You fix a PSU cause you know what you're doing and have the time, not because it's economical to do for someone else
      - nwiswell 4y ago
        Hmm! It certainly seems like if it's worthwhile for anyone to do with unspecialized labor, then it would certainly be worth doing for a specialist. Why is it that I've never heard of a power supply repair technician in a data center?
        tinco 4y ago

genewitch 4y ago

$145 is pretty steep, and I'd like to see the Vpp (also called ripple) before considering this. I currently use picoPSU (ASIN B005TWE5E6), 50W and 80W versions to power 7th and 8th gen atoms and celerons. I use a "UPS" style 12VDC PSU connected to a fairly large sealed lead acid battery - about 4x the volume of a standard UPS battery. As far as my measurements go with the induced noise from the PSU for radio reception work, it seems to work pretty good. I've looked at using SBCs instead, but you're never really going to get away from buck/boost on boards, since some things need 3.3 or less volts (memory, etc). The picoPSU also have survived for years up in elevator attics with all of the machinery and dust. never had an outage caused by the picoPSU or the attached 12V UPS stuff. I wonder if it is possible to run more than one board off the same PSU. I know you can run a board off multiple PSUs, but is the inverse true? If i ever get a new batch of these 25W TDP computers racked, having 2 of these connected to two UPS and 6 computers might be cool. It's just the ATX connector that needs population, i use NVME whenever possible, no GPU, no cards, just USB and ethernet onboard.

rektide 4y ago
> I wonder if it is possible to run more than one board off the same PSU. Absolutely. There's something I can't remember about signal lines that need to be set up, but yet, people have been running multiple computers off as single supply for a long long long time now. Also worth warning people ahead of time, it's hard to predict what kind of specific power consumption a motherboard will have. There's so many power rails going in. 3.3V, 5V, 12V, -3.3V... Making sure that each rail is adequately rated for additional motherboards can be a challenge. Ideally one would test each supply line, one by one, to try & figure things out, & compare against rated specs of the power supply. Intel's been pushing a new spec called ATX12VO, short for 12-volts-only, which does away with all the other rails & has the motherboard expect 12v. This would make it much easier to understand what power consumption is. I do seem to recall some of the new ATX specs (3.0?) also kind of expect power-consumers to declare how much power they expect to use, as a safety/planning feature, which could complicate this one easy-to-do hack (unless there's some way for the additional motherboard/motherboards to also declare their power draw). This might only be ATX3.0's new 12VHPWR connector, which works alongside PCIe 5.0-- not sure if it also impacts motherboards or not.

bradlys 4y ago

Here’s to hoping for titanium rated power supplies becoming the norm like GaN chargers - and for a reasonable price!

causality0 4y ago

Is it just me or are the size benefits of GaN power supplies overblown? The 100w GaN type-c charger for my new laptop is less than ten percent lighter than the 100w charger for my decade-old Dell, while being six times more expensive to replace.

ed25519FUUU 4y ago
Isn’t it a lot smaller (not lighter) though? I think the main benefits are size and efficiency, not weight.
- causality0 4y ago
  It might be about thirty percent smaller by volume. It's not any more convenient to carry around because instead of being a candy bar shape it's perfectly square and actually wider than the old one. While not related to it being a GaN charger, it being a permanently attached type-c connector is a recipe for disaster considering how much more delicate it is than a traditional laptop charger. I'm probably going back to a ThinkPad for my next laptop and the charger connector is not an insignificant reason why.

ParksNet 4y ago

We need a new ATX standard with external power bricks and smaller components. Giant ATX cases are unnecessarily huge, but laptops are too small and noisy. There's not much of a middle ground.

Hamuko 4y ago
Mini-ITX?
toast0 4y ago
Like another poster said, Mini-ITX can be fairly small; I've got some 3.3L cases (includes a 150W power supply). My case has room for a 2.5" drive and a laptop optical drive (kind of, there's a related model that has an opening for the optical drive, mine just has the mounting place for it), you could get a smidge smaller if you omit that. There are smaller cases especially if you have and don't count an external power supply. If you do MicroATX including a MicroATX case, that's meaningfully smaller than ATX but there's no price premium. If you want to get smaller, the CPU coolers are the tricky bit, and I'm assuming you're ok with integrated graphics, GPUs and their coolers are pretty immense as well.
saxonww 4y ago
There's plenty of middle ground. In terms of size, you have Mini ITX as pointed out by another comment, and there's MicroATX which is perhaps more common than regular ATX. And of course there are several mini systems like the Mac Mini, Intel NUC series, and derivatives/copies of the NUC. There are a lot of case options for small Mini ITX systems, I'm using an NCase M1 which is a 12-13L by volume case. There are smaller cases, but the smaller the case, the less flexible it is with configurations, which is one reason they large ATX cases are still popular; it seems like a lot of enthusiasts like clear side panels and rgb light shows and so forth, and a tiny case isn't as exciting. There are also multiple PSU size options. The NCase M1 I mentioned can use a regular ATX PS, but an SFX power supply fits better; SFX seems like maybe half the volume of a regular ATX PS. There is also SFX-L, which is a bit bigger so it can house a larger fan. These smaller PS standards are typically lower power, although you can get 650W+ SFX supplies now I think. Silverstone and Corsair were regarded as having the best SFX supplies last time I was looking. Finally, there are a couple of options for external power bricks like you suggest. As mentioned elsewhere there is a PicoPSU which is a DC/DC converter the size of a 24 pin ATX socket. It just plugs into the ATX socket on any regular ATX-compatible motherboard and has some cables attached to the sides for peripherals. There's also the 'Thin Mini-ITX' standard, which is I think intended for digital signage and industrial stuff, but if your requirements are modest you can use these for a desktop also. They integrate a DC/DC converter and use a 19V laptop ac adapter. The ones I've seen are best suited to on-chip graphics and m.2/msata drives, though.

divbzero 4y ago

s/GAN/GaN/ GAN [1] happens to be a machine learning construct. 250 W of electrical output would be rather surprising. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

paulmd 4y ago
scoff all you want, this was the plot of The Matrix! (the original script was written with the sensible "using humans as a biological computer" angle but they worried audiences wouldn't get that newfangled computer thing in the basically prehistoric year of 1999, so they changed it to be humans generating power which... isn't how thermodynamics works!)
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  This really adds more to the encounter between Neo and The Architect. > Neo: "You won't do it, you need humans to survive." > The Architect (phrased angrily and bitterly) "There are some levels of survival we are prepared to accept."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  You could have combined it with Idiocracy - all the people in the Matrix act slow and dumb because most of their brainpower is being used to run weather simulations or whatever you'd do with a world-wide supercomputer.
- prutschman 4y ago
  "But that's crazy, Morpheus. Thermodynamics says.." "And where did you learn about physics, Neo?" "..... In the Matrix...."
  - paulmd 4y ago
    I upvoted at the time but I just wanted to mention that I've scrolled through my comments/replies a few times and I've been chuckling every time I read it. ;) been kind of a crappy couple weeks for me due to family illnesses and it did bring a smile to my face. feels like a "the matrix has you" sketch from the flash player days...

Ayesh 4y ago

I have a laptop that draws 240W over a square slim tip, and recently saw a 240W GaN power brick. Like the photo in the article, it's comparable to an iPhone in size, but what prevented me from buying it was the weight (400g) and the price ($155 IIRC). I think the sweet spot of GaN is in wall adapters that deliver 18-45W over USB-A/C for mobile devices rather than PSUs where the size/weight doesn't matter as much.

TruthWillHurt 4y ago
I actually have a 100W GaN charger for my 100W Razer Stealth 13''. Super compact and great for travel. The new Razer models actually come with the GaN charger included!

walrus01 4y ago

GaN stuff is also used in the smallest and highest power compact tx power amplifiers in the rf chain for the buc/sspa on two way geostationary satellite terminals now. Some of the BUCs now are 1/3 the size of 12 years ago. Other small and dense terrestrial microwave and millimeter wave things use gan power amps too.

Dunedan 4y ago

The website of the manufacturer provides more information and more photos: https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html https://hdplex.com/hdplex-fanless-250w-gan-aio-atx-psu.html

ericbarrett 4y ago

94% efficient! When I started building PCs it was common to see 60-75% if you weren't inside a very narrow window of optimum load. It's mind-blowing how efficient electronics have become. Also < 0.4W idle. Wow.

zokier 4y ago
"80 Plus Gold" rating already required up to 92% efficiency, so 94% isn't that groundbreaking. Here is one random example from 5y ago that hits 94-96% efficiency https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime-titanium-power-supply-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11252/the-seasonic-prime-tita...
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  I disagree, 92 -> 94% is a 25% reduction in waste!
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    At 100W load, it's a 2.3W reduction is waste. If it's on 24/7 that's about 20kWh over a year, or just shy of charging my old Nissan Leaf once. Then again, 20kWh here, 20kWh there, it adds up.

aix1 4y ago

Could someone ELI5 what makes GaN PSUs/chargers more efficient than earlier technologies?

diffeomorphism 4y ago
It is not so much about efficency but about size. Galliumnitride generates less heat than silicon, so you can make much smaller power supplies.
- Doxin 4y ago
  If I recall correctly GaN transistors also just generally are better in a lot of metrics. Faster switch times, Lower resistance, Higher permissible voltages, etc. It really does look like a miracle technology.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Are they good for logic (CPUs, GPUs etc) as well or just for power applications?
    - namibj 4y ago
      In theory, but they are hard to miniaturize for logic ICs.
    - kf7njh 4y ago
      I would argue probably not. GaN has a higher bandgap voltage (3eV iirc... 1eV for Silicon), which means a CPU would need to be run at a higher voltage. As a quick rule of thumb for huge transistor count ICs: Power (heat) = freq*Voltage^2 I won't go into detail, but you can see how for a CPU designer decreasing voltage is critical to increasing speed. Remember a decade ago when CPUs were like 1.2V and we hit this ~3GHz "wall"? But now due to breakthroughs in process nodes, CPUs are running I think ~0.8V but boosting up to 5GHz. If we make the same CPU on a GaN process, the transistors would probably need ~3V to switch, and thus need to be run about 9x slower to meet the same package power (or I guess you could run it at the same speed but then try and figure out how to cool a 9x higher TDP CPU). Furthermore, GaN is difficult to manufacture into a monocrystaline perfect lattice compared to Silicon. You can image that for modern 7nm/5nm nodes, where there are sometimes angstroms of distance in a transistor, having a foundation full of defects can be devastating to the yield. Power electronics is a totally different domain with different challenges. In this area GaN excels, but for ICs I don't think it makes sense. Let's see in 20 years though. GaN is relatively new compared to Silicon and might just need some further refinement. Just my 2c though. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

torginus 4y ago

I think the chief limitation here is the ATX standard itself. Modern devices could make do with a single 12V rail (especially at this wattage), that would reduce the cabling and simplify the PSU circuitry as well. A lot of prebuilt OEMs and consoles and not to mention laptops already use this approach.

PossiblyKyle 4y ago
On one hand, I definitely agree. On the other, my issue is that motherboards are already one of the least reliable components in your PC, and introducing even more complications to them just makes the situation (and the cost of replacement) worse
- bradfa 4y ago
  Going to only 12V power to the motherboard doesn't actually make them much more complicated, or any more complicated really. Like half of a modern motherboard design today is just power supplies anyways, as all CPUs will do voltage scaling to save power. It's not like your CPU takes 3.3V input directly, most are running in the 0.8-1.5V range, even DDR4 is 1.2V, and the CPU is the majority of the consumption on the actual motherboard (high power graphics cards usually have their own 12V input connector, the PCIe edge cannot transfer enough).
  - dicknuckle 4y ago
    I expect motherboards could be more reliable if there was a standard 12v to 5v, 3.3v, 1.5v etc pluggable converter that they all used. It could cut down on E waste. Instead of having to discard an entire motherboard, the low voltage converter board could be swapped out and repaired/discarded. The same companies that make ATX power supplies could also make the discreet low voltage converters. ATX innards could be smaller, less wiring between components. No that's silly, we should continue to use a design from 1995, itself replacing a design from 1981.
    - bradfa 4y ago

nimish 4y ago

Could be denser. Instead of a big passive EMI filter, use an active one (noise cancelling, essentially). It's a little baffling why they aren't more widely used, they aren't that complicated. https://u.dianyuan.com/bbs/u/17/1086016427.pdf https://u.dianyuan.com/bbs/u/17/1086016427.pdf is an example. It's almost comically simple: connect a current sensor, a high-pass filter, and an opamp controlling a transistor. With some thought it could probably be cut down even more. I think TI has integrated this into their controllers already.

hoseja 4y ago
Consumer electronics are just so hilariously bleak. Why use the smart option when a cheap one almost does the job too? That would be overengineering and everyone can do that! Only the smartest engineers know how to deliver maximum value to shareholders while offloading the maximum possible externalities! Sorry, pet peeve of mine.
- nimish 4y ago
  Yeah it's really disappointing that even in high cost consumer electronics there's very little incentive to innovate in non-sexy areas :(
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Is the passive one more reliable, less to go wrong?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nimish 4y ago
  Well the big electrolytic caps you need for the passive filters are infamously unreliable which is why you see everyone trumpeting their "Japanese" brand capacitors which are supposed to be better. The caps you need for the active filter are the tiny solid ceramic ones that are basically bulletproof except in high vibration environments. The ICs needed are similar.

londons_explore 4y ago

The littlebox challenge back in 2014 required 3 watts/cm^3 to compete... This 'ultra compqct' only offers 1.18 watts/cm^3 in 2022. While this might be the best on the market, it is far from what is technically possible.

tecleandor 4y ago
But that was an inverter, so DC --> AC. But also, I don't know if that really makes a difference :P

londons_explore 4y ago

This supply goes to quite some effort to have a good power factor and filter harmonics sent to the grid... But why? Grid operators typically have laws in place saying how many harmonics you're allowed to inject, and for stuff under a few kilowatts it's totally fine to just have a bridge rectifier straight to a capacitor. That's what every other electronic device in your house will do. If you're making a high efficiency power supply, you'd probably want that to be a synchronous rectifier to get 1% or so more efficiency, but it would still only be drawing current on the peaks of the sine wave. But I don't see why you'd want to go to much effort to make your current draw a nice sine wave rather than a series of peak-chopping spikes. Is it to save money on copper in the power supply wire perhaps?

formerly_proven 4y ago
> and for stuff under a few kilowatts it's totally fine to just have a bridge rectifier straight to a capacitor. That's what every other electronic device in your house will do. The EMC Directive mandates compliance with IEC 61000-3-2 which certainly requires you to do a little bit more than hook up a bridge rectifier to the grid.

zasdffaa 4y ago

Could an EE comment on the safety of this.

solarkraft 4y ago
Not an EE, but it's a consumer product sold through non-shady channels, so it's presumably very safe.

aasasd 4y ago

Difficult to imagine the size from a photo with a phone (maybe it's due to me being a user of Android, idk). I'd prefer to see it next to previous small power supplies—because I'm vaguely sure I've seen some of comparable size and wattage for NASes, and my shopping for them was ten years ago. However, this one is likely considerably slimmer in height.

hnuser123456 4y ago
1x2x7 inches
kraftman 4y ago
Theres a comparison here vs other standard PSU sizes: https://hdplex.com/pub/media/image/Product/250WGaN/overview/HDPLEX.250W.GAN.Size1.jpg https://hdplex.com/pub/media/image/Product/250WGaN/overview/...
- aasasd 4y ago
  Ah, indeed I should've taken a look at the manufacturer site. However, I'm pretty sure that there is a format narrower than FlexATX from the picture — because I was thinking of buying a PSU like that for a petite NAS. (Until I learned that there are small, silent and cool external PSUs, similar to ones for laptops.)

Jaruzel 4y ago

Looking at this, makes me wish (again!) that there was a globally agreed colour scheme for Live/Neutral/Earth wiring....

deepsun 4y ago
I always thought Neutral is White, Earth is Black, and Live is everything else (like Red).
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Here in the UK, Neutral is blue, Earth is Yellow & Green striped, and Live is Brown. Unless... the wiring is over ~30 years old, in which case it's Black + Red for Neutral and Live.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  Yellow & Green striped is the IEC standard for earth here in Europe AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60446#Protective_earth_and_neutral_(PEN)_conductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60446#Protective_earth_and...
- jbotdev 4y ago
  In the US it’s White for Neutral, Green for Ground, Black for Hot, Red also Hot (usually for the other hot/phase on 240v or three way lighting).
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  As usual there's the American way and the International way.
  - deepsun 4y ago
    Stop dividing people! I'm International, by the way :)