Need dirt cheap very low power PSU
Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:42 am
Hello,
I'm gonna add a firewall to my network that'll be very low power and passively cooled:
HP mATX motherboard from VL400 series
PIII/Celeron 600Mhz (12w)
1x PC133 DIMM
1x CF card on IDE bus
1x PCI NIC
With an old Chieftech 300w PSU it draws 22w from the wall. For estetic and noise reasons and because the Chieftechs efficiency is probably under 60% at the extremely low load I want a better PSU solution. Problem is my budget is very close to zero
A couple of things I've contemplated:
* Somehow use the old 18.5v Compaq laptop brick I have lying around. What is the cheapest way to get ATX out of that?
* Find a cheap/used Mini-ITX DC-DC PSU; if I find a 12V one, is there any way I can use the above mentioned brick with that? Resistors?
* I read somewhere someone used a PSU from an old discarded external drive cabinet to power a system. There's no way to pull 12, 5 and 3.3 volts out of a PSU like that? I guess that could be a cheap way to get 12V to the mITX PSU above though?
Any suggestions?
Kent
I'm gonna add a firewall to my network that'll be very low power and passively cooled:
HP mATX motherboard from VL400 series
PIII/Celeron 600Mhz (12w)
1x PC133 DIMM
1x CF card on IDE bus
1x PCI NIC
With an old Chieftech 300w PSU it draws 22w from the wall. For estetic and noise reasons and because the Chieftechs efficiency is probably under 60% at the extremely low load I want a better PSU solution. Problem is my budget is very close to zero
A couple of things I've contemplated:
* Somehow use the old 18.5v Compaq laptop brick I have lying around. What is the cheapest way to get ATX out of that?
* Find a cheap/used Mini-ITX DC-DC PSU; if I find a 12V one, is there any way I can use the above mentioned brick with that? Resistors?
* I read somewhere someone used a PSU from an old discarded external drive cabinet to power a system. There's no way to pull 12, 5 and 3.3 volts out of a PSU like that? I guess that could be a cheap way to get 12V to the mITX PSU above though?
Any suggestions?
Kent