The Single 12V Rail SilverStone Olympia OP650
by Christoph Katzer on July 13, 2007 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Primary Side
The primary side includes the PFC stage. It is mostly constructed with its own printed circuit board containing the PFC silicon (active PFC). Some power supplies have microchips with a combined PFC and PWM control which is important for the secondary stage. This power supply, however, is built with a single active PFC chip on the extra PCB.
Like we mentioned earlier, there are three small main caps on the primary side instead of only one big one. They are separately rated with 150µF and built by Hitachi. This company is used by many other manufacturers as well. The last shot shows the rectifier bridge on the far right side directly connected to the heatsink.
The Transformers
As mentioned before, Silverstone is using two main transformers in this power supply. We have seen this in several other power supplies from Tagan and Cooler Master. But just because a two transformer design is used by more than one manufacturer doesn't mean they're all created equal. There are several ways in which transformers can output different rails. You can, for example, let the one transformer generate several 12v rails and the second one does the 5v and another 12v rail. Or let one transformer generate only one 12v rails and everything else on the second one. The 3.3v rail is, in every case we've seen, generated with a voltage divider from the 5v rail. This is also done with the negative 12v rail from one of the positive 12v rails. Silverstone is running the two transformers in tandem to provide all rails simultaneously.
The primary side includes the PFC stage. It is mostly constructed with its own printed circuit board containing the PFC silicon (active PFC). Some power supplies have microchips with a combined PFC and PWM control which is important for the secondary stage. This power supply, however, is built with a single active PFC chip on the extra PCB.
Like we mentioned earlier, there are three small main caps on the primary side instead of only one big one. They are separately rated with 150µF and built by Hitachi. This company is used by many other manufacturers as well. The last shot shows the rectifier bridge on the far right side directly connected to the heatsink.
The Transformers
As mentioned before, Silverstone is using two main transformers in this power supply. We have seen this in several other power supplies from Tagan and Cooler Master. But just because a two transformer design is used by more than one manufacturer doesn't mean they're all created equal. There are several ways in which transformers can output different rails. You can, for example, let the one transformer generate several 12v rails and the second one does the 5v and another 12v rail. Or let one transformer generate only one 12v rails and everything else on the second one. The 3.3v rail is, in every case we've seen, generated with a voltage divider from the 5v rail. This is also done with the negative 12v rail from one of the positive 12v rails. Silverstone is running the two transformers in tandem to provide all rails simultaneously.
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Araemo - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That makes sense, and makes me think my guess about the 20A limit is possibly a contributing factor - It would be a safety issue if someone hung 40A worth of fans, lights, motorized case windows, whatever you want.. off of one pair of wires (IE, one molex connector feeding into the mass of extenders and passthrough connectors that most fans and lights I've seen use.).You'd likely overheat the wires carrying all that power, if not the connectors as well, which could cause fire or electrocution hazards.
While a GPU may draw significantly more than 20A, they are also using 3 pairs now, so the actual power draw will be closer to 20A per pair.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
The PCIe V2.0 PSUs I've seen suggest only using connectors from the same 12V rail for PCIe graphics cards -- because if you don't, you'll be connecting the common from two different 12V rails together.This can cause issues.
If a graphics card has one 4pin and 1 8pin connector, like the HD 2900 XT, the GPU can potentially draw up to 225W from a single 12V rail through 2x PCIe graphics power connectors (3 pairs). That's about 19 amps through one rail for one PSU, but not over each pair.
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
They explained it.The Intel ATX standard calls for no more than 20 Amps per 12V rail. So in order to avoid maxing out a single 12V rail at 20 Amps, PSUs have multiple rails support up to 20 Amps each.
If you use a single rail that can max out at 54 Amps as stated here, then you do not need the additional rails, but you are going against the ATX standard.
Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Also, I didn't see if there was a reason that it was advertised as a single rail, yet you have 4 12V rails.Nice article...really love the line curves for the load outputs. One thing I noticed missing is ripple testing. Any reason why it's not here?
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That confused me as well. I think they mentioned that the PSU supposedly includes an ability to turn the other rails off, but it doesn't work, and it always has 4. They did state the PCB was originally designed for 4 rails.Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Nevermind...disregard my statement about the ripple testing. I probably just missed it in the original article after skimming the comments from it :)