Wednesday, April 13th 2016
Phanteks Announces the PowerCombo - Power Your Rig with 2 PSUs
Phanteks today announces the release of their patented Power Combo. The Power Combo is design to maximize your power output by allowing you to connect two power supplies. The Power Combo will be a true plug and play that requires no splicing and cutting of the wires. The Power Combo is design to be safe and secure. The Power Combo features a redundant power supply architecture concept, this prevents the system from shutting down when one power supply fails. This ensures that all your vital information and data will not be interrupted or lost.
The Power Combo can run high end systems that requires more power output by combining 2x top tier PSUs. The Power Combo is fully compatible to Mini ITX, mATX, ATX, and E-ATX motherboards. The Power Combo features a unique soft start circuit that limits the inrush current to help improve stability and reduce transient voltage drops. The Power Combo will help share the load current of the two power supply and improve the power efficiency. The Power Combo is cost efficient and provides maximum power and efficiency.Available from April 2016, The Power Combo will be priced at €39.90.
The Power Combo can run high end systems that requires more power output by combining 2x top tier PSUs. The Power Combo is fully compatible to Mini ITX, mATX, ATX, and E-ATX motherboards. The Power Combo features a unique soft start circuit that limits the inrush current to help improve stability and reduce transient voltage drops. The Power Combo will help share the load current of the two power supply and improve the power efficiency. The Power Combo is cost efficient and provides maximum power and efficiency.Available from April 2016, The Power Combo will be priced at €39.90.
30 Comments on Phanteks Announces the PowerCombo - Power Your Rig with 2 PSUs
I guess there is a demand for devices like that, otherwise it wouldn't have appeared at all...
Wondering if this board is just an electrical junction for a pair of PSUs, or if it actually provides some kind of level of redundancy in case of PSU failure?
Phantek has also recently released a Power Splitter, which probably has a much better market value:
www.phanteks.com/assets/manuals/PH-PWSPR_EN.pdf
Even if the board gives redundancy it will only be redundancy for the MB power, not for the processor, not for the disks, not for the GPU, so it would be rather useless without a simular setup for ALL the devices not getting power from the motherboard.
That beeing said, i think this is MUCH better than the reverse solution (one PSU, two systems).
You then have the ultimate uselessness, 2 PSUs fed to the PowerCombo and then fed to the PowerSplitter to feed to systems, inconvenience in every step.
The PowerCombo can be useful in situations were you need more than 1500 watt, A dual socket workstation with 7 FuryX (or equivalent) cards for compute power will eat up over 2000 W.
JAT
- File corruption
- Human error (deleting files by mistake)
- Catastrophic damage (someone dumps water onto the server)
- Viruses and other malware
- Software bugs that wipe out data
- Hardware problems that wipe out data or cause hardware damage (controller malfunctions, firmware bugs, voltage spikes, ...)
I would have it on a different local drive and offsite/cloud, etc.In case if you can find a dual-psu case you can either get, let's say, a pair of 80+ Gold certified 600W PSUs for $80-$100/ea plus another $35 (assuming price is the same as splitter), or simply invest $200-$250 into a decent 80+Gold 1200W PSU.
Something like Aerocool Imperator (1150W, 80+Gold, modular) goes for less than $150 where I'm from (all estimates are current prices converted from UAH to USD).
The argument about dual-PSU for a huge server with centi-core dual CPU and gazzilion Fury X cards is ridiculous. The only board that can actually accommodate all of that is EVGA Classified SR2, which is about as rare as a pink tasmanian badger.
In regards of usefullness: power splitter can actually have a lot of practical applications.
For example:
- running 2 POS systems from one case (150W TFX PSU + pair of Celeron N3150 rigs or something alike).
This is the most important use, because I got couple of those rigs and each runs from a separate 230W PSU while actually consuming less than 30W from the outlet.
- Cubicle setups in offices are always paired. 2 PCs in one case + Wake-on-KB is excellent space/energy conservation strategy. I actually had a similar setup at work for the administrative desk. 2 mITX boards with 2 SFX PSUs were fitted in one tower.
One PC was used for security camera monitoring, another one for booking administrative paperwork, both used from the same workspace by a single person.
- Many of you are crunching for WCG, and some of you have several dedicated crunching machines. I think it will be very useful to run pair of rigs from the same PSU assuming that there are no videocards involved and you have the means of ghetto-mounting this stuff in some kind of box/case.
The Asus Z10ped16 WS takes 2 2011v3 CPUs and has 6 PCIe 16x slots
The Asus Z10ped8 WS takes 2 2011v3 CPUs and has 7 PCIe 16x slots
The Asus X99E WS taskes 1 2011v3 CPU and has 7 PCIe 16 slots
Al three are more common than the unicorn fart the EVGA board is.
2x E5-2687W v3 is 320W, 7 Fury x is 1750 W, in total 2090W, add the board and some drives and you are looking at 2200 W full load.
- For the POS systems, a small Pico PSU of 45 W would be smaller and allow you to turn one off completely independent of the other.
- Even more importantly here, with separate PSUs you can turn the system completely off, with a singe PSU for two systems the best you can hope for is to hibernate one.
- Pico PSUs would save more space, the only fringe case is if you already have one leftover PSU and two systems for CPU crunching.
www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/ESC8000_G3/overview/
Or wait for an upcoming NVidia DGX-1 with eight P100 cards (I am not sure what's the use for 6-8 GPUs in one system besides compute). A pair of PicoPSUs with a pair of generic 12V 40W laptop chargers will probably cost same or more than splitter box and 80+ TFX PSU:
2x$25 [Pico] + 2x$15 [Charger] =$80
1x$35[Splitter] + 1x$45 [80+ Gold TFX PSU] = $80 That is true. Genuine PicoPSUs are also hard to come by outside US. I have access to chinese clones, but those have tendency to explode and cost approximately the same.
I had to ask my brother to send me a pair from US, but those were stolen while my package was on hold in customs...
I am working on redoing a compact power supply from a Chieftec ITX case: almost as small as PicoPSU, but requires a lot more wiring. Meanwhile TFX is about as small as it gets for me right now (powering Celeron J1800 + 2.5" HDD from a 230W Delta PSU).
As for two pico PSUs costing the same as one TFX PSU with splitter, that just proves my point, you do not gain anything in space, but if the PSU fails you take both POS systems down, while with separate PSUs one failure leaves you with half capacity, not no capacity.
Check out the Antec ISK110 VESA, its as small as a ITX box can be, with a pico PSU capable of running a i7 3770k. It would be a much better option that a combined box with two systems in it.
To be frank, this is just an overpriced prettied up jumper to enable the simultaneous operation of two PSUs to enable stupid stuff like quad 295x2 by splitting the graphics cards across two 1200Ws and having them both turn on at the same time. They slapped the "redundancy" tag on there because it provides a rather crippled version of it.