Hi All,

I havent seen this question answered explicitly, but how much power does a basic A4000 use up in regular use? I am more curioous as to what an "appropriate" power supply would be (assuming the original power supply was underpowering the machine).

Right now, I have a towered A4000 with a mediator (net card, sound, radeon) which also has a Deneb, Buddha, and Cybervision PPC. It also has the CyberstormPPC card on it too.

I currently have a 550W power supply in it, but with all those cards sucking electricity, I am wondering if I still need more?

I am guessing that these older vintage computers from the 80's-90's arent as "efficient" as the more modern produvt lines, no?

Thanks

@Gothmog

I also have an A4000 with PPC equipped with a CVisionPPC card, and two extra Zorro cards, and I still use the original 250W PSU without any problems.

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@Gothmog

My A4000 with Cyberstorm PPC, Mediator with Voodoo 3, network card, scsi hard disk, several fans, fully populated ram, deneb, ZorRam, uses about 70 watts peak.

I measured it with a device that plugs in-line to the power cord and wall giving a digital output of the watts.

When CPU's (060 and PPC) go to 100% it gets to about 70 watts. Idle CPU it's about 60 watts give or take.

I am using original A4000 power supply which I think is rated for a maximum of 145 watts.

Last edited by HammerD on 27-Aug-2010 at 07:38 PM.

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@HammerD

Thanks all. Good to know 550w is more than enough. :)

I think your watt meter is broken.

There was a thread on amiga.org where they measured their high-end big box Amiga system and a loaded A4000 with PPC and Mediator is easely over 100 watt idle (which is actually quite a high power consumption IMHO).

My old A4000 with 060/PPC 233MHz with Permedia2 was around 90 watt idle, 100 watt load IIRC.

A 060 A4000 with graphics board should be around 50-60w, an A2000 around 50-60 w with some cards.

My A1200 with Apollo1260, IndivisionAGA and CF-card is around 25 watt idle.

Most power hungry systems seems to be the A3000T/A4000T

@Gothmog

A 550W PSU might be overkill for your setup, 200W should be more than enough, unless you have lots of hard drives as they do need a lot of juice to spin up when the machine is first turned on.

My A1-XE with 2GB RAM, 2 HDs, DVD, 2 sound cards and Radeon7500/128MB draws 87 to 90W.

Older hardware can be less efficient, like CRTs and older LCD monitors, but any old CPU which runs cool is going to be more efficient than new ones, in the sense that they don't waste energy in the form of heat.

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