this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Super Flower’s beastly 2800W power supply lands at $899 — enough juice to power a couple of RTX 5090 GPUs (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 6 days ago by Alphane_Moon to c/hardware
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[–] theunknownmuncher 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Let me just plug my PC into the dryer outlet real quick

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I was gonna say.

A typical US household circuit is 15 amps. At 120 volts, that's 1800 watts. You'll also see some 20 amp circuits, but that's still just 2400 watts. You'd have to go to the heavy appliance circuits to draw more than that.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 240V circuits that some countries use can probably squeeze more on; might be aimed at that.

kagis

https://www.quora.com/How-many-amps-are-in-the-UK-household-current

In the UK, the standard household current is typically supplied at 230 volts with a frequency of 50 Hz. The circuit breakers in most homes are usually rated for 16 amps for general-purpose circuits, such as lighting and power outlets.

That'd be 3680W. So you could run it on a typical household circuit in the UK, though it'd eat up a lot of the circuit's capacity.

EDIT: I mean, I assume that realistically, this is for datacenters trying to optimize compute cost, buy fewer PCs to run more compute cards in parallel, so they probably aren't going have as much of a problem with it.

Also, if they keep ramping up how much heat they're putting out per unit of space, I don't know whether existing datacenters are going to be able to handle the cooling.

[–] Glitchvid 6 points 6 days ago

Further, US national electric code states that a continuous load (3+ hours) is de-rated to 80% ampacity, so we're looking closer to 1400W.

The solution if you really need that much wattage in the US is to use a 240V circuit, dual pole 20A breakers are commonly available, Romex yellow is fine for 240V@20A, just gotta get a NEMA 6-20 outlet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

At least here in Finland having each room behind a separate, or sometimes multiple, 240v 16A breaker is fairly common and has been for quite a while.

E.g our living room has four in total - outlets on the opposite walls are two 16A circuits, the electric heaters on a third, and lights on a 10A one. The main breaker is 3x35A three-phase IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Who is going to need that much power in a desktop PC? Nobody uses multiple GPUs for gaming anymore. If you are using them for GPU compute, you would be better off with server hardware and multiple power supplies.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Obviously to use a 4090 as a PhysX accelerator for a 5090: https://youtu.be/h4w_aObRzCc