Considering PSU replacement, need opinions

Pylor

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 9, 2012
Messages
422
I recently purchased a Lenovo thinkserver TS140 off amazon for ~$220. The power supply it comes with is pretty weak, and it's configuration is weird almost to the point of being bizarre. I had a few thoughts that I was looking for second opinions/options on. Here's the specs of the machine as it stands:

i3 4130
Lenovo TS140 mobo
1x 4GB unbuffered/unregistered ECC 1.35v DIMM (soon to be 2)
MSi 270x gaming, with a slight OC but no voltage alterations.
128GB corsair mx100 SSD I grabbed as a OS drive
Intel pci-express NIC soon to be upgraded to a 2x port intel NIC

And here's the power supply, it's kind of a weird duck: ACbell PCB005 - 280 watt 80 plus bronze, with 16.0A on a 12.0V1 rail and 16.0A on a 12.0Vcpu rail (270 watts total 12v)

My first concern, before buying, was the wattage of the PSU, as the 270x has a TDP of 180 watts. I plugged the system into a kill-a-watt (I know they're not perfectly accurate) and measured the system power during a variety of tests. Idle: 30-35 watts; Prime95: 60-65 watts; 3dmark combined test: 165-180 watts. My second concern is that the PSU only has a single 4 pin out and a lenovo custom 14pin out to the motherboard, The sata power cables then have two 4 pin outputs that are connected to two 3x sata power cables. I get the two 6pin pci-e from 2-to-1 sata-to-pcie cables, with one plugged into each sata cable to balance the load.

My main questions are: is it worth it to get a new power supply? I'd be looking at something gold rated for better efficiency. Considering this thing draws ~30 watts from the wall at idle (where it would be 95% of the time), I can't imagine a gold PSU would do much for me considering the load %. Is the from-motherboard-to-sata-to-pcie configuration considered safe? I felt the cables during 3dmark and they weren't warming up, so I'm assuming the first 90 watts come from the motherboard, and the remaining power would be split between the two sata 4 pin outputs.
 
I'll be honest, the GPU is for HTPC madvr purposes, so anything that I get would be quiet and low power. I figure if I ever want a new GPU I can get a PSU then, unless there's a good reason to upgrade now. I was also thinking I'd just keep an eye on PSU prices and keep an eye out for a good sale. I was mostly just concerned with safety and efficiency.
 
Well, I can answer this myself. No, the setup does not work, it might only draw that much power from the wall, but it's not capable of supplying the power needed. I hooked up the computer to my TV to finally mess around with the HTPC stuff, and when I played gravity using madVR in MPCBE it was a poppy (sound) mess. Every time there was a pop the render time would shoot up a bit too. With lower power-requiring videos (my copy of gravity is a straight blu-ray rip) there were no issues. Chalking this up to power supply and buying the cheapest gold power supply on newegg and a 14 pin converter off of ebay. If it's not the power supply then I probably have bigger problems!
 
Last edited:
Watching a movie isn't taxing the CPU completely or the video card at all.

I'd be surprised if it was the PSU. They normally don't cause weird windows problems in my experience, they cause BSOD, power-offs, and overall systems that don't boot or have video.

Update us.
 
Watching a movie isn't taxing the CPU completely or the video card at all.

I'd be surprised if it was the PSU. They normally don't cause weird windows problems in my experience, they cause BSOD, power-offs, and overall systems that don't boot or have video.

Update us.

I'm using madVR to render the video, which does tax the GPU quite a bit depending on settings. It's the same as playing a game though I don't think it taxes the CPU as much as a game would. I only use madVR for my big screen TV and the card was functioning great in the server listed in my signature. My other concern was some sort of pci-express bus interference from the extra NIC I put in (I don't think pci-express has issues with that like pci did but I figured I'd check), and I still got the pops and microstutters here and there when watching.

I ended up ordering a cheap (after rebate) ENERMAX REVOLUTION X't ERX430AWT. It's not my preferred brand of PSU, but this whole thing was supposed to be done on a minimum budget.
 
Last edited:
Just an update, I got my $15 ATX to 14-pin lenovo adapter from ebay today (expensive for what it was). Turns out the problem was NOT the power supply. I probably should have tried a few more things before I bought it as it increased my total cost from $300 to $355, atleast I I have a halfway decent 430 watt gold PSU. Having sata power cables coming OFF the motherboard just doesn't suit me when you consider that those sata cables end up powering the graphics card.

Anyways, I replaced the PSU and there was still popping/micro stuttering occurring, so after letting out some curses, I reformatted and tried setting up the filters and madVR again. This time around it performed great, better than my old server did infact. I also never realized how CPU demanding that video processing was either, it gets that 4130 up to about 60% cpu usage which is higher than I figured it should be. I'm honestly not sure what I did differently, as both times I copied and pasted my madvr configurations and tried to set the filters the same. The second time I followed a guide and might have gotten something different selected. Who would have thought a filter could cause audio popping on passthrough audio.

TLDR: Always exhaust your software options first before blaming hardware, even if it is an awful setup/configuration hardware wise.
 
Back
Top