Two Power Supplies in One PC?

Was having some issues with my current set of power supplies in my PC at home. None of them are able to support the GeForce GTX 280 that was lent to me by Asus a couple of weeks ago.

thermaltake psu I got an extra Dynamo Pro 600w and a CoolerMaster 550w Real Power SLI but none of the two are able to carry the juice needed by the Asus GTX 280 on the system.

My idea is to combine the two PSUs to effectively harness about 1,000w of power for the rig (instead of buying another Gigabyte Odin 1200w, which costs pretty expensive). Anybody here has done that? One power supply will run the motherboard and the peripherals while the other PSU will solely power the graphics card.

My concern now is voltage fluctuations between the two PSU might fry the board or some other parts. asus geforce gtx280

Incidentally, I found this Power Supply Calculator from eXtreme. I plugged in my rig specifications and it says I only need 377watts. Now that’s odd.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

21 Comments

Synapse says:

16 years ago

very interesting
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ace says:

16 years ago

Although your rig will only consume 377 watts based on the calculation, you’ll also need to factor in the current that the components will draw.Each rails in the PSU (if more than one) can only support a specific amount of current. If the PSU have multiple rails, it is setup such that one rail is dedicated to CPU, chipset power while the others are for PCI peripherals and other components. Even if one rail’s (for the CPU for example) power and current is not totally consumed, it can’t be used for the other peripherals (for the CPU only). In any case, the current and power needed by the components must be both met by the PSU rails that supplies it. For better information regarding this, there’s a thread in TipidPC detailing the power and current consumption of most video cards as well as a thread explaining PSU calculations. You can also ask tips from there.
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drew says:

16 years ago

o nga no? bat hndi ko un na isip.. hmm.. that’s a nice idea! i’ll try that sir. hehehehe
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vance says:

16 years ago

It is doable but very hard. Secondly the Dynamo is not a good brand it is closely related to Acbel and such. So no wonder it won’t run your GTX 280! second cooler master is really good brand but 550W is not enough.

Suggestion go with a Gigabyte Odin 700 to 800 Watts, it is about 8K. you can get one in TipidPc, brand new. that is enough for a GTX 280. No need to go overboard to 1.2K watts. kahit nga 1000 Watts gagana na! exage na yung 1.2K. even a SLied GTX 280 will run on very good 1K watt PSU.
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Snow says:

16 years ago

I’m not very techie but an additional power supply in one pc is interesting.

Pero teka,

hindi ba magastos ito sa kuryente?
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ace says:

16 years ago

The total power consume by a PSU is just the power consumed by the PC components plus the loss power depending on the PSU’s efficiency.
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Jay Soriano says:

16 years ago

@Snow

i think Sir Abe can harness the power of the SUN! hehe..
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jojo says:

16 years ago

video cards should be more power efficient also
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jun says:

16 years ago

using two power supplies in one pc is old news.

on another note, just get a nice psu with a high efficiency ratio, certified 80 plus. a good brand that comes to mind is corsair. the corsair hx620 can definitely run the gtx 280
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jhay says:

16 years ago

I’ve always used PSU from Corsair, the price is well worth the money.
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