PicoPSU powered by Meanwell??

[Demthios]

Not sure really where to put this in the forums but here goes.

I'm trying to building a render farm currently, and I want to be able to take up the smallest foot print possible. I've seen the Coolermaster 5 ITX boards in one case and it gave me an idea. Now I have no idea on how to go about rewiring a power supply to have them connect safely to a Picopsu. So I was trying to figure out how to power multiple Mini-ITX/Micro-ATX boards with PicoPSU's and a single input to the wall. I thought of meanwell but not having any luck finding one that would have enough 12v outputs to power 4-5 of them. I just have to power the board and the CPU/Ram. I plan on running it diskless, so no hard drives, and no CD/DVD drives either.

Does anyone have any idea's or suggestions on how to get this up and going?

[ben333]

You sure can power a Pico PSU off of another 12V source than the brick it comes with. I've run it off a regular computer power supply and I've also run it off of a 12V UPS battery. Just make sure you have enough power to provide to all the pico PSUs, I think the brick made for them is 12V 5A. A better idea in my opinion is to take some old 20 / 24 pin connectors off old supplies and re wire a few of them onto one GOOD quality high wattage power supply. I bet you could run as many as four mini itx systems off of a good quality 500+ watt supply. You also don't need to waste the money on a lab supply and all the pico supplies. I'd imagine you would also have better efficiency :)

[DonNiger]

Does your m-itx'es have 24 pin ATX powerconnector or just a single 12v input (like some HP boards)

[Demthios]

A better idea in my opinion is to take some old 20 / 24 pin connectors off old supplies and re wire a few of them onto one GOOD quality high wattage power supply. I bet you could run as many as four mini itx systems off of a good quality 500+ watt supply.

Do you mean like daisy chaining them together? What would you do with the 4 pin then the same thing?? I've read the write up on how to split the 24 pin and 8pin to a 4pin to be able to run 2 boards off 1 PSU but I would rather be able to run 4 boards off of one PSU of some sort.


Does your m-itx'es have 24 pin ATX powerconnector or just a single 12v input (like some HP boards)

They will have the normal 24 pin ATX connector, I still might go with the Micro boards since there aren't any i7/AM3 mini-ITX boards out right now.

[Demthios]

Ben333 you had me considering the single PSU for multiple PC route today and I ran across this website (http://joule.bu.edu/~hazen/LinuxCluster/). He had custom made PCB's to distribute the power from a single PSU to 3 motherboards. Now these are running the same way I want to diskless, no graphics cards, just CPU/Ram/Mobo.

Now these are made for P4's back in 2005, so I know I would have to redo the PCB for 24 pin vs 20 pin. But my question is...what type of PSU would I need to push 3-4 Quad Core, Micro ATX boards with onboard 8100 geforce and 4 gigs of ram?? Here are some pics of the PCB's he had made.

http://joule.bu.edu/~hazen/LinuxCluster/img_0065_sm.jpg

[ben333]

I know the thread is old but currious how you came with your project. Sorry I didn't reply again, I don't visit here very often. The custom PCB idea to distribute the power to all the systems is a good one, and probably better than the cheaper method of simply adding on the additional motherboard connectors needed. That would work though - just adding connectors, as long as your PC power supply is strong enough. Since you'll be saving the money of not needing one supply per computer, I would say get a high quality unit, maybe something 1000W from a decent name. The actual power draw won't be near that, but you'll want a good supply to be powering quads.

[yngndrw]

There are two types of PicoPSUs - The normal ones and the wide input ones.

The normal ones use the 12V input as the 12V rail and hence require a nice regulated supply. The wide input ones regulate their own 12V rail and can be supplied from an unregulated power source as long as it is over 12V. (Some can also take less than 12V, but their 12V rail is not enough for some CPUs.)