Just a number of years in the past, we have been impressed to witness a 2,000W energy provide for mining programs at Computex. But with arrival or AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper WX and Intel’s Xeon W-3400-series – CPUs that may devour all the best way to 900W beneath heavy hundreds – in addition to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 graphics playing cards (or, nicely, H100 PCIe for AI), 2,000W PSUs are now not solely overkill. As new processors have raised the bar on energy consumption, so has the bar been raised on PSUs themselves. as evidenced by this 12 months’s present, with a number of energy provide producers exhibiting off new excessive PSU designs that go as excessive as 2,800W.
To that finish, I’ll start the story from the least ‘excessive’ PSU that I noticed at Computex and that is Seasonic’s Prime PX-2200 80+ Platinum-badged ATX Three PSU. The unit dealt with a custom-built AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX-based PC with 256 GB DDR5-4800 reminiscence and 4 Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 graphics playing cards with out breaking a sweat on the commerce present.
It is noteworthy that the Prime PX-2200 has just one 16-pin 12V-2×6 energy connector for graphics playing cards, so Seasonic used adapters to energy three out of 4 RTX 4090 boards.
Moving on to a extra highly effective PSU, which is Enermax’s Platimax 2400W 80+ Platinum-rated ATX 3.1 energy provide. This one has two 12V-2×6 auxiliary energy connectors for graphics playing cards, which is greater than sufficient for an excessive gaming system. Enermax didn’t showcase this one in motion at Computex, maybe, as a result of it’s nearly half of a 12 months away and but has to go all the mandatory assessments.
The Enermax Platimax 2400W is about to enter mass manufacturing this December and shall be accessible for $499, in response to the corporate.
But what’s 2,400W, if you may get all 2,800W? Well, Super Flower’s Leadex SF-2800F14HP 80+ Platinum-badged ATX 3.1 PSU can ship 2,800W to a high-performance CPU and 4 graphics playing cards over 5 voltage rails. This energy provide is nicely past what even a high-end desktop wants, and appears aimed extra at workstation-style AI programs for analysis or on-prem inference. This one is anticipated to be accessible later this 12 months for round $599, in response to a consultant on the sales space.
It goes with out saying that these excessive energy provides have a moderately restricted market. Not solely due to the small base of programs that would ever want a PSU that could possibly be measured as a a number of of horsepower (745W), but additionally due to outright mains compatibility – the usual US 15A/120V outlet cannot drive way more than a 1600W PSU. So energy provides like these are solely readily usable in Europe, and in places within the US with non-standard shops. Then once more, should you want a 2,800W PSU, you possibly can in all probability afford the electrician wanted to get one wired up.
