1U Power Supplies for Servers?

Andrew_Carr

2[H]4U
Joined
Feb 26, 2005
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Anyone have experience with small PSUs (mini-ITX / 1U form factor) with enough output for about 300-400W of CPU usage? It turns out there's a computer recycling warehouse down the street from me so I have a consistent supply of $40 servers. They're all generally fully functional but are ancient tech so at best, the included power supplies only have 1 x 24 PIN motherboard cable and 1 x 4 PIN CPU power cable. I'm trying to run 1 or 2 x 32 core EPYC CPUs (180W TDP each) per server so it looks like after ripping out all the old hardware I'll need to replace the power supplies as well. So far options that seem like they'll work are:

1.) Buy a server PSU and a breakout board ($150-200 / each set) and the appropriate cables. The power supplies are cheap but the custom breakout boards are still like $80 + cabling.
For the most part these test fit ok and seem to be fine when it comes to space as well.
2.) Buy something like these. Problem is that with only a single 8 pin CPU cable I'll be limited to about 230W and the price jumps to about $200 / PSU for most other models.
https://tinyurl.com/2xx7hret
https://tinyurl.com/9bbse9n5
3.) Just run a single CPU per 1U case and get 2U cases for the dual CPU motherboards. Then I should have more space and could probably just use a regular ATX power supply in those.
 
Ive ran 50+ of the supermicro pws-563-1h20 (560w). They have 2 8pin and you can push them pretty close to the limit, reliably, for quite abit of time. Ive ran a dual Opteron plus one GPU off one and it did just fine.

They run around ~$30 on eBay the pws-561-1h20 is $20
 
Ive ran 50+ of the supermicro pws-563-1h20 (560w). They have 2 8pin and you can push them pretty close to the limit, reliably, for quite abit of time. Ive ran a dual Opteron plus one GPU off one and it did just fine.

They run around ~$30 on eBay the pws-561-1h20 is $20
Awesome, thanks! Those look just about perfect.
 
ya going to run gpus in these servers?

No, purely CPUs for now. It's hard to find cheap server cases for GPUs that'll let me swap the motherboard out easily. I've found some old HPC servers but generally the motherboards are custom sized into weird shapes so I can't replace them with an atx sized square board.
 
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