Taipei , Taiwan , Feb. 26th 2007 – GlacialPower Inc. and GlacialTech Inc. are the professional companies to focus on products of SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supply) and cooling Industries respectively. Today we would like to expound our design philosophies of GlacialPower Power Supply to the public.

Since we launched our new product line of PSU in January 2007, we have got frequently inquiries about the wattage capacity: 350 to 450 watts seem to be the minimum in current PCs today and the first 1000 Watt PSU is already in the market, how do we expect the market development tendency? The further questions concern about how to combine our cooling and acoustic technologies with our PSU products? Or why does GlacialPower not unveil the PSU with the shiny housing?

Firstly, we would like to manifest the fact that our watt means "real" watt. Several customers have compared our 350 W PSU and told us that ours can deliver even better performance than their current 450 W PSU of other vendors. We believe that to be honest to our customers is the best sales policy and we describe clearly our technical specifications. All our PSUs (GP-PS350AP, GP-PS450AP and GP-PS550BP) can delivery the real output of 350 W, 450 W and 550 W and can even support PSU environment temperature up to 50 °C. We have noticed on current channel market there are lots of PSU brands, with which either their products can not fulfill their specification or their PSUs can not support the real power under the 50 °C environmental conditions.

Secondly, for most PC system builders the main trend of PSU wattage nowadays is from 250W to 450W. Intel CPU trend in 2007 is to lower down the thermal power. As we know, Intel CPU possible comes down to 55 watt (new Core2Duo) in the upcoming next 9 months and QUAD CORE 6600 will be 65 watts in Q4'07 with 12MEG cache. Actually, the output from 450 W to 550 W PSU is ok for gaming system, even the system newly installed 8800 VGA cards from Nvidia requires 250 W.

Based on desktop PC PSU design guidelines released by Intel, the maximum defined output wattage requirement for ATX system for power supply is 450W. How does Intel define this maximum 450W power rating as a reference guide? As we know, Intel made many different system configurations in order to evaluate various power consumption forecasts and probabilities that cover from entry level system to extreme high performance of home digital system. So, we do believe the 450W output power rating defined with low risk can cover most extremely high performance of desk top PC system applications.

However, nowadays, the PC system design is an open architecture without limit for the application. The user can configure a system based on their expectation and on what the system performance may require. Even the industry is now going towards dual-everything : Dual Core CPUs, Dual CPU's per main-board, dual graphics cards connected to your dual monitors. What comes after dual? --- Quad. Next we'll see a lot of quad-something. Quad core CPU's are being developed as we speak or what about two dual-cores processors per main-board? So 1000W PSU might be huge up to now, but it will be just-made for the future or specific professionals and gamer application. We will unveil our next product line of 80 PLUS to provide real 700 W PSU by the middle of 2007 upon channels' demands.

About the acoustic noise level, it is very important to design the products beyond the limit of PSU or CPU coolers. For GlacialPower PSU, we pay more attention to optimizing PSU fan curve through a unique fan control circuit. As you know, PSU is an energy transfer device and creates a lot of heat inside PSU. The PSU fan has to provide enough air flow, so as to exhaust the thermal inside the system and PSU, to cool down electrical parts and to maintain system proper operation and reliability. Most PC systems work on low load conditions of even high loading with low duty period. GlacialPower PSU fan curve design leverages between acoustic and product reliability to provide optimum system application.

From the environmental and technical point of view, the fancy exterior design is not necessary for power supply. It is a built-in part for system application. The user should pay more attention to product safety and should check if the product design is reliable to match the data sheet description.
If CPU is the brain of computer metaphorically, then PSU will be the heart of computer. A power supply unit transforms AC power to DC to provide enough energy for system operation. The most important is that all magnetic components, aluminum electrolytic capacitors and power semiconductor devices have enough rating with margin to assure power supply reliability under worst case conditions. More critical is to make sure the power supply design with enough feedback loop Gain and Phase margin for stable operation.

The fancy exterior of system chassis might be important for selling but not for the nature of Power Supply. We should enlighten and educate consumers about this fact.

Most users are not professional enough to understand about PSU. They always read the label or DM information as a judgment for buying. The Power Supply is really a professional device in IT industry. Most of Tier 1 OEM customers have dedicated their professional power supply engineering team to review and qualify PSU design (Safety, Reliability, Compatibility, Performance, Material and Production Process…etc). Accordingly the PC dealers have to have more professional resources to help the consumer to identify the PSU performance, the same as OEM engineering team activities, in order to introduce and to deliver safe and qualified products for consumers.