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Samlex America 320 Watt Industrial Power Supply
Page 2.
Review Date: July 30, 2003
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: Sidewinder Computers
Before I had a proper power supply, I had used a 350 watt ATX power supply to power the MCX4000-T. At idle, the ATX PSU worked fine and kept the CPU at about 55-57*F at idle. This was running the 3.0C at 3.6Ghz which was the maximum stable overclock I could achieve. The problems developed when the CPU was stressed, like when playing video games such as Unreal Tounament 2003 or Battlefield 1942. During video games, the CPU is stressed to near 100% causing it to heat up drasticly. It was clear that an ATX power supply was not meant for this job. The CPU temps at 100% load would exceed 100*F - nearly a 50 degree change from idle. This often caused system lockups, and I would have to reboot the PC.
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Hooking up the Samlex America PSU is pretty easy. I chose to use a 4pin molex connector for a "quick disconnect", by cutting the leads in half then wiring one end to the MCX4000-T and the other to the power supply.
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Wiring the power cord is easy as well. There are 3 wires - a green, a black, and a white. If you don't have much knowlege of electrical wiring, just use the picture below for reference. The funny looking symbol is the posative (green wire), the white is neutral, and black is negative.
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Testing:
Before actually hooking the power supply up to the peltier, I wanted to do some testing on the actual output. The Samlex America 320 has a voltage adjustment that will allow you to adjust the voltage going to your pelt, for some fine tuning. This is an excellent feature since it will allow you to tweak your peltier voltage to get the maximum overclock possible.
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I used a Craftsman multimeter to check minimum and maximum voltage output. At the lowest possible setting, the voltage output was 9.23 volts. At the maximum setting, I got a voltage of 13.74. This is the perfect range for what we want to accomplish.
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With the Samlex America PSU now hooked up to the peltier, I went into the BIOS to see the CPU temperature, and adjust the voltage to get the lowest possible temp at the least possible voltage. With some tweaking of the voltage, I found that the best setting for this setup was 13.00 volts which yielded a temperature of 42*F according to the BIOS. This is non-overclocked, with CPU at default.
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Overclocking:
Once Windows XP Pro was fully booted, I went into Motherboard Monitor to check the temps. The CPU temp was 48*F at idle, with an ambient case temperature of 104*F! So, with my baseline set, it was time to see how far I could push the CPU with the Samlex America PSU powering the peltier.
After all was said and done, I got the Pentium4 3.0C to run at a stable 3.75GHz with a core voltage of 1.75v. This is a full 175MHz faster than I had achieved using the ATX power supply!
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At 3.75GHz, the CPU was still running a cool 53*F and never went over 65*F at full load!
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Conclusion:
If you are wanting to get a bit more Extreme with your CPU cooling, and wander into the realm of peltier cooling, the Samlex America 320 watt industrial PSU is a must have. As we demonstrated, using an ATX power supply is a very common mistake made enthusiasts using thermo-electric cooling. It leads to system instability, and can vastly shorten the life time of the peltier. There are other risks as well. ATX power supplies will sometimes fail prematurely due to the excessive stress being put on them by the peltier. If this happens, your CPU could overheat and cause permanent damage, and possibly kill it altogether.
The stability difference when using the Samlex America industrial PSU was blindingly apparent. The test system was able to hit a higher overclock and the CPU was much cooler at full load. Also, the ability to tweak the voltage output no doubt aided in getting a higher overclock. The last thing I want to mention is the fact that the Samlex America PSU ran much cooler than the ATX PSU. The ATX PSU was almost too hot to touch at times, but the Samlex America stayed quite cool at all times. It was only slightly warm to the touch. Very nice!
The only problem with this power supply is that fact that you may have a hard time getting it to fit inside your PC case. We would like to see one that exactly fits the dimensions of say, a CD rom drive. This would make it easily mountable into a 5 1/4" bay.
PCExtreme gives the Samlex America 320 watt Industrial PSU 4 X's! It is a must have for anyone wanting to use pelt cooling in their system.
The Samlex America 320 watt Industrial PSU is available at Sidewinder Computers!
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