eric, you're welcome for the help. all things considered, I think that for the kit you have, the furmans will be absolutely fine and you bought the right power conditioners.

Your stressing for no reason man, the worst that will happen is that you'll trip a circuit breaker and your hardware will lose power. You won't be electrocuted because in most houses built/wired recently (last 20 years) everything is wired to make sure that nothing can start a fire (with circuit breakers etc). If your house was built more than 20 or 30 years ago, its always a good idea to get an electrician to check all the same. Your gear is protected from surges by the furmans so it will never be damaged except by blackouts anyway, and blackouts only damage computers I believe?

RE clean power: this only makes a difference to outboard analogue gear (especially gear with tubes) but sometimes a little dirt can be good right? You buy analogue for more warmth, and having a slightly fluctuating voltage is part of what gives you that. Voltage makes absolutely no difference to digital equipment.

quote:

Originally posted by kitphillips Your stressing for no reason man, the worst that will happen is that you'll trip a circuit breaker and your hardware will lose power. You won't be electrocuted because in most houses built/wired recently (last 20 years) everything is wired to make sure that nothing can start a fire (with circuit breakers etc). If your house was built more than 20 or 30 years ago, its always a good idea to get an electrician to check all the same. Your gear is protected from surges by the furmans so it will never be damaged except by blackouts anyway, and blackouts only damage computers I believe? RE clean power: this only makes a difference to outboard analogue gear (especially gear with tubes) but sometimes a little dirt can be good right? You buy analogue for more warmth, and having a slightly fluctuating voltage is part of what gives you that. Voltage makes absolutely no difference to digital equipment.

Yeah, I was initially concerned about an electrical fire, but you're right, I don't think I'm in any danger of that, just better safe than sorry you know? My house is only 20 years old so I think it's all good. I'm happy,

quote:

Originally posted by Eric J Studio Total - 699 W

I'm surprised that those synths take so little power but it does sound reasonable. They probably regulate down to 5 V or less and don't actually do any power amplification. So yeah, 700 W sounds fair, and in that case, you definitely do not need to worry about current draw! A baseboard heater uses more than that.

quote:

Originally posted by CReddick Double check the power supply on your computer.. my G5 draws about 9 amps all by itself.

I seriously doubt that it uses 1.1 kW of electricity, even at peak. A typical dual-core G5 power supply is 450 W and it's rare to even find a PSU on the market higher than 650 W (I can see only one for sale that's rated @ 850 and one @ 1000 and I can't imagine what anybody would need them for - the PowerPC 970 is rated at 42 W so even a quad-core would only need 80 W more than a dual-core).

Even server PSUs aren't rated that high, and Ultra320 SCSI with 8 hard drives all @ 15K RPM running at full load 24/7 is going to draw a lot more power than a G5.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut I'm surprised that those synths take so little power but it does sound reasonable. They probably regulate down to 5 V or less and don't actually do any power amplification. So yeah, 700 W sounds fair, and in that case, you definitely do not need to worry about current draw! A baseboard heater uses more than that.

Yeah it seemed like most of my synths took a similar amount of input power. All of them have a PSU except the Virus B, but I checked the manuals and in some cases the back of the units. Thats what was listed, so that must be correct. The Event monitors seem to require the most power at 100W each.

I have a Dell PowerEdge 830 server that has a 450W power supply, but Dell must have put that in there to power the 4 SATA drives. It's a server-class machine, so I'm not suprised that the power supply in there is bigger than a workstation-class machine. That thing is definitely the largest power consumer in the room.

Anyway, I appreciate all your help!

Again, keep in mind that a 450 W PSU does not necessarily draw 450 W - that's just the upper limit.

I've got two large SATA drives sitting out here, one is +5V 0.46A / +12V 0.56A and the other is +5V 0.72A / +12V 0.36A. Each is less than 10 W, and the spec for a Raptor is just under 10 W, so four of those would still run you under 40 W, maybe 30 W or so. Not really enough to require a 450 W supply.

The biggest consumers are the CPU (Core Duo is rated at 31 W, Athlon X2 is 35-65 W, PowerPC 970 is 42 W, quad-core Xeon is 50-80 W), and the video card (Radeon X1950 is an obscene 270 W at high load, GeForce 8800 is about 250 W).

So if you get one of those 8-core Mac Pros with two quad-core xeons and two Radeon X1950s, you *might* push 410 W for those two parts and maybe 450 W if you include four hard drives plus a few additional expansion cards and/or USB devices. 500-600 W tops if you've got a bunch of DSP cards or other unusual stuff.

All this talk of needing 800 or 1000 W is just ridiculous. These companies are just pandering to the crowd that thinks bigger is better ("our board is so awesome that your puny little power supply probably can't handle it!"). The average Core Duo or Athlon X2 machine will never use more than 300-350 W.

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My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

Yeah I'd have to agree with you on those monster power supplies. I can see maybe needing something like that for some of the larger Dell PowerEdge servers or maybe some Sun SunFire V series, because those usually have 4, 8 or more processors with SCSI backplanes. Even then, those boxes will have redundant power supplies in them, so I do not see the need for a 1000W power supply.

I can only guess that the "bigger is better" methodology is what is driving the massive PSU's.