[geeks] Of video cards and power supplies...

[Jonathan Groll]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 05:46:26PM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
(snip)
>Anyway, I theorized that I could eliminate the sounds by getting a
>different power supply, rather than replacing my graphics card or voiding
>its warranty trying to 'fix' it.  After some research, I settled on a DC
>to DC design by Delta that's packaged by Antec as the Signature 650,
>reviewed here:
>
>http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/658
>http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=113
>
>With test results that showed ripple and noise below 16mV on all rails in
>jonnyguru's tests, I had hope that this extremely clean and capable design
>would solve the problem.  I doubted that Corsair or BFG - the company that
>branded the NVIDIA reference design GTX 280 - would do anything about a
>design flaw that NVIDIA is at fault for, after all.
>
>In my experience thus far, the Antec Signature 650 has not demonstrated
>any squealing with the GTX 280, and I wouldn't be surprised if other high
>quality DC-DC designs such as the Enermax Revolution and Seasonic M12D
>also cope well with badly-designed cards such as the NVIDIA GTX 280.

Hi Nate,

What am I missing here? From the "hardwaresecrets" review of the "Antec
Signature 650" it seems that this PSU accepts 110V AC as input (and
has a rectifying bridge), so in what way then is it a DC-DC power
supply? 

I see that it uses Schottky Rectifiers later to regulate DC-DC
conversion, so is that then what makes it different to 'regular' ATX
power supplies (don't the low grade PSUs have switching power supply
components in them then, albeit of inferior quality / underspec'd /
without over-current-protection)?

Yours wanting to learn more,
Jonathan