back to article Gigabyte Odin GT 800W power supply unit

Manufacturers love to cram extra features into every part of a PC, but it comes as a surprise that Gigabyte - making its debut in the PSU biz - has managed the same trick with its new Odin GT 800W power supply. Gigabyte Odin GT 800W Gigabyte has borrowed some aspects of the Odin from other high-end PSUs, so the casing is …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    800W!??!

    If anyone actually needs 800W to run their machine they should investigate the possibility of getting a life.

    There should be much more kudos involved in getting machines to run on as little power as possible these days. My server typically runs at less than 100w, with a 2GHz (ish, can't really remember off hand) AMD, PVR card and three HDDs.

  2. Peter Kay

    Another content free review, I see

    What's the efficiency? How loud is it? How much power can it *actually* deliver on a sustained basis? What are the amperages on each rail? It obviously wasn't tested under full load. How hot does it run under normal use and under load?

    How long are the cables when building a case, say into the Antec P180 where the PSU is at the bottom? What's the MTBF? Hell, *what are the dimensions* ?

    Thereg would have been better printing 'Gigabyte releases PSU with blue LED and USB connection. Go check their website. News at 11'. Although, I actually *would* check their website if it didn't take half an hour to download the manual, a task that perhaps you'd expect a journalist to summarise for you.

    It'd also be nice to have prices for sensibly priced PSUs, as even a fully loaded SLI system will have trouble peaking 600W... 800W is frankly just for bragging rights.

  3. Phil Endecott

    Ban it.

    ...and mine runs at under 20W.

    There's a story on the front page at the moment about banning cars that do more than 100 mph. Let's also ban PCs that take more than 100W.

    This PSU actually wastes more power than my whole system takes.

  4. Roger Lipscombe

    Naff monitoring software

    If I never see another naff, custom-designed, skinned fan/temperature monitor, it'll be too soon.

    Asus does it; Motherboard Monitor (MBM5) does it. They all look like sh*t, and usually don't work with a limited account (LUA).

    I think that Microsoft should force hardware vendors to make this information available as standard Windows performance counters, which means that I can use standard tools to monitor them.

    Maybe make this a logo requirement?

  5. Leo Waldock

    Content free?

    In normal operation the Odin is effectively silent thanks to the huge fan turning at a very slow pace. When it's loaded ... well we don't know because, as you saw in the review, the load didn't reach 50% even with a Quad core CPU and HD 2900 XT. I could have used an Intel V8 test bed but it's crystal clear that the Odin is aimed at the gaming market so no doubt it would have been pointed out that the V8 is a server/workstation.

    At start-up the fan runs at full tilt for a couple of seconds and makes a heck of a racket and then slows right down to a crawl. I have no doubt it could cool a small volcano.

    As for efficiency, I gave the figures of 328W and 355W so the efficiency is over 90% when the PSU is barely working for its living at less than half its rated power. The only way to properly test the Odin is to hook it up to a test rig such as the one owned by Enermax. As it's the only Odin in the UK I doubt Gigabyte would have been impressed if I had let a competitor blow it to pieces to see how well it delivers 700+ Watts when we all agree that no-one needs such an outrageous amount of power.

    Which is what I said in the review.

    As for reading like a Press release well you're welcome to your opinion but I've never seen the word 'gimmick' used in one yet.

    As for naff monitoring software I quite agree. Motherboard manufacturers seem obsessed with the latest new idea when very often what we want is something elegant and workmanlike which probably explains at least part of the success of the iPod.

  6. Peter Kay

    20W? Laptops don't count... or, your power meter is broken.

    Even my 486 draws a shade under 50W with a power hungry TV card in it.. The only thing that approximates to 20W is a Winterm. VIA's based systems are more along the lines of 30W+.

    It's still no comparison to a modern system, running a half decent graphics card.

    You'll be lucky if a decent, fast modern PC takes less than 100W idle. 20W? Don't make me laugh.

  7. Nexox Enigma

    20W

    I imagine that if you got yourself one of those Via EPIA N boards at 533 MHz, with a flash module for a harddrive and a really slick power supply you might be able to pull this off. The board itself draws about 12 Watts, though I haven't been able to find out if that is at load or idle. You might even be able to use a laptop harddrive in there, as the newer low power ones will draw less than 5 watts peak. Even so, that doesn't include a monitor, and the computer you end up with is pretty impressively slow. The Via CPUs perform slower clock for clock than a Pentium II, so you're looking at maybe a 450MHZ PII with roughly zero video power, and probably not too much ram, since larger modules draw more power.

    I suppose a rather stripped Linux distro could use that to surf the web and listen to music, but as soon as you needed to compile something (Proper support of all the hardware on that board would require a kernel compile, which would likely take about 8 hours) you'd be wishing you'd just shelled out for a 35 watt computer.

    Well that was fun to think about, time to go back to working on the 3 machines that are putting out a combined 1KW of heat under my desk w/o aircon.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Winterm

    Good evening,

    Ahh this is interesting, I've been thinking how to cut my power usage for a while and had this idea for a little while.

    I work with Winterms at work and dare I say it Wyse's Rapport so I understand how alot of the Winterm terminals tend to work.

    I've come up with an idea to use a Wyse Winterm V90 as a general download machine/general browser machine at home. It has 256MB RAM, 512MB flash as standard and a low power footprint.

    I've not yet received it yet from Ebay (I won one on an Ebay auction though!). I did try the same idea with an old Compaq T20 but it had do little flash and RAM than I gave up before even starting. My idea was to use USB external drives for the storage and the flash to use a custom Debian 4 net install with just the most basic Linux install (or possibly Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux). The V90 also seems to have a Award BIOS and allow booting off harddrive, so I could at worst install Ubuntu on a USB harddrive and do a special kernel for the V90 :)

    Well I've yet to start it but it should be interesting, the only thing that worries me is that I have a feeling that Wyse put the BIOS/bootloader in the flash memory.

    If anyone is interested read these:

    Linux on Compaq EVO T20 HOWTO

    http://www.kazak.ws/evo/

    WYSE Winterm hacking - News - Linux for the 3000 series

    http://winterm.gaast.net/

  9. Peter Kay

    Winterms..

    It's worth doing, provided you need *nix facilities. For just browsing and RDP, either the Winterm's thinOS or Windows CE is perfectly adequate. Note that various Winterms are low power, but do not suspend to use even less power (i.e. they *always* use 20W even when off) whilst low power PCs will suspend to use even less.

    A USB external drive will work, but will add about 8W+ to power requirements. A USB key is probably somewhat less. The flash on a winterm can be upgraded, although using a special NAND flash in compact flash format (*not* a true CF card) card. Extra RAM can be added to many (standard SODIMM).

    The flash is updated either by parallel cable, or via TFTP; both can be patched to run Linux, and if the image is properly prepared, at quite low risk. The main problem is that the display chipset is poorly supported, and needs high CPU utilisation to work.

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