This extraordinarily small power supply packs over 200 watts onto a board just 155mm long and 23mm wide. Small enough to fit directly on to my Insight P4-ITX board (if weren’t for the over sized Samsung active riser), and because it works at upto 95% efficiency, it gives me the opportunity to remove almost all the power supply heat from within my PVR box.
It also solves another problem: When I designed the passive cooled case for the Nehemiah board, I left out the DVD drive because the M10000N board wasn’t going to be powerful enough to allow a future version of DigiTV to record directly to DVD. The mini-box PSU should allow me to remove the old ATX power supply and free up enough space for a DVD burner.
Measuring the power consumption, using a Lutron average reading power meter and a DC clamp meter, while running Nebula DigiTV (I.e. Its normal activity) proved interesting:
Strangely, the mini-ATX power supply required about the same power, 76 watts , running the Celeron 2 GHz and the Pentium 4 Mobile 1.2 GHz even though the P4-M uses 8 watts less power. This must be because the efficiency of the power supply changes with the load; the more the loading the better the power supply performs.
In the worst case my mini-ATX mains supply will be dumping 30 watts of heat into my case. The PW-200-V only needs to supply 10 watts at 3.3 volts and another 8 watts at 5v, with its high efficiency converters, it’s no wonder the little supply was barely warm while drawing 6 amps at 12 volts from my Powerline lab supply. I’ll need a sizable ‘wall-wart’ to power the PVR with DVD drive , something in the region of 80 watts should do it.
