Peter, I think that SOtM is on that PCB because he is saying "I do all of this in one little chip instead of this whole board".  Paul is Taiwanese and his English is not great but is getting better all the time.  The downloads are the specific drivers from NEC for the USB chips on the card and they can be used or not used.  I use the recommended driver but I can also just use the generic driver bundled with Windows 8 and it works fine.  Note that there is no USB3 driver native to Windows 7 so perhaps the driver may be specifically targeted at those not using an o/s with native USB3 support.

Regards,

Anthony

Nothing to do with SOtM and a much better product.  It is simply a standard USB3 card based on a specific NEC chip that has been upgraded withe better TXCO and a little transformer among other things.  You don't need a driver, but the NEC driver can be used if you wish.

Peter, the Asrock mobo has 3 x PCIe slots and only 1 x PCI slot.  I understand that the silent video card has the heatsinks and takes up a couple of slots, but can't you move it to the slot furthest from the CPU and then slip in a PCIe card behind it?

As far as cards go Peter, I would recommend you try two...a standard USB based on the NEC Chipset and the PPAstudio USB3 Card.

Cheers,

Anthony

Peter, do you know off-hand the voltage and amperage draw of the USB board?  This is the board that the 3A supply feeds is it not?

Anthony

Hi Nick,

WOW!!.  Please provide some more details and photos.  I am interested by your battery solution.  Are you considering a super low noise linear psu as a more permanent solution or do you think you will persist with the battery?

I have access to a SMT oven and a hot air gun here and could probably duplicate your work and provide a second opinion if you like.

Cheers,

Anthony

Nick, I reckon you guys should pull that card out after you listen to it so you can have a good look at what has been done to it.

Keep us informed.

Anthony

Paul, I _think_ that noise is more important than ripple for a USB card, which when you think about it the entire reason to use that USB card is to reduce noise making its way along the USB cable.  Not all linears are created equal, which may be why the modder of that card recommends a battery supply...but I am hoping that I (well Peter probably) can produce a definitive very low noise supply for that card.

Anthony

There is a good thread going on these things over on my local forum at the moment.  A product made in the UK has fared very well in the value for money stakes.

Anthony

At the moment any gains/losses in sq from this linear psu project are theoretical and speculative at best.  We just don't know, and as you said early in this thread this is a VERY complicated area.  

I know of one respected audio engineer with good products (that I have owned) that was convinced by his clients to try a simple single rail linear power supply into his computer.  Eventually he gave in, put together a good one with a Hynes reg and could not figure out why power supply made such a difference in his system as it had in his clients systems.  No real explanation...it just worked above and beyond the "hash into the mains" theory.  Adding a LPSU to the USB card that I have in my computer ratchets up SQ in my system.  Why?  I don't really know but it may be something to do with grounding or noise on the USB cable or even placebo.  I've tried it a few times now just for a sanity check and I get the same result every time.

Anyway, the reason I have started this thread is because I want to know what will happen if I put high quality linear power into everything and learn which components benefit from that power.  If we can get away with two or three rails that would be awesome and relatively inexpensive, but if we don't try we won't know for sure.

Anthony  

My PC is on the dedicated audio circuit (dedicate from the mains box)...my monitors are on another circuit for the other computers.  No separate ground for audio...I'm pretty sure that's illegal here.

My monitors are run on a separate circuit to the audio gear (which includes the XXHE PC) which has its own dedicated circuit.

We would need a big LPSU for a monitor...mine draws about 70w in general use, but I've never measured it at startup.

How vibrant would the colours be!!!!  haha

NUMBER OF RAILS

Another thing to think about is the number of rails that the supply will require to operate the pc.

A special consideration is the 5V Standby pin on the ATX power supply.  The ATX power scheduling requires the 5V Standby line to be powered whenever the AC is turned on in the power supply.  This rail is operated by the little switch that you find on every ATX SMPS.  Turn it on and the 5V Standby rail becomes active and some of the circuits in the motherboard are powered.  The Asrock X79 Extreme4-M motherboard that is standard (and highly recommended) in the XXHE PC will draw no more than 1A from the 5V Standby rail, but the ATX power specifications suggest that 2A be made available to suit future motherboard features (at present this powers the front power button on your pc case, wake-on-lan, wake-on-usb etc).  Do we provide 2A to this rail or just 1A?  A 1A rail is easier and cheaper to build.  This rail must be powered BEFORE any of the other rails.

Now, it may just be the case that running the maximum possible number of rails into the XXHE PC produces the best results.  But it may also be the case that we can combine some of these rails to make the final product that Peter will produce (I think that is what will happen) less expensive and better bang for the buck.

Maximum number of rails that can be fed into the XXHE PC:
#1 5V Standby line
#2 P8 12V 6A
#3 SSD 5V 2A
#4 PPAstudio USB Card - ultra high quality 5v 0.2A feed
#5 P24 3.3V 3A
#6 P24 5V 5A
#7 P24 12V 2A
#8 Fans 5v 0.5A

Minimum number of rails that can be run into the XXHE PC:
#1 5V 9A for Standby line, SSD, PPAstudio USB card, P24, fans
#2 12V 8A for P8 and P24
#3 3.3V 3A for P24

I do not think that 3 rails can work well.  Firstly, the PPAstudio USB card will be quite responsive to an ultra high quality power supply and we are just not going to get that with 9A on that rail.  Secondly, the 5V Standby will generate a lot of heat (up to 45W) and will use plenty of power if the switch on the back of the linear power supply is not turned off when the PC is not in use.  Thirdly, we may find it beneficial to run the fans on a separate rail to get rid of the electrical noise messing with other 5V components.  Fourthly, I would be a little surprised if powering the cpu separately did not provide some advantage to the entire computer, considering much of the electronic noise probably comes from there already.

So I guess that I am saying the XXHE PC LPSU will probably end up with somewhere between 6 and 8 separate rails. 

I suppose a further contentious point is the inclusion of the PPAstudio USB card in the XXHE PC build.  A couple of us have tried it now and it seems to work well: maybe we should get others to try it also and give their opinion.  The one to convince though is Peter.  Are you tempted to try one of those cards Peter?

Cheers,

Anthony

Peter, do you care to elaborate how you intend to get away without a single drive in the XXHE PC?  Are you trying to run the o/s from an external drive?  Maybe load the o/s onto a ram disk?  If that can even be done.

Anthony

Hi Arjan,

Yes Paul Pang does offer a modified wide input picoPSU type of dc-dc converter (not sure that it is the picoPSU brand) to which he has grafted higher quality wire.

Your thinking was not far off what several people at the moment do with the P24 socket which is something I suggested at the JPlay forum: power up the pc with a picoPSU and then use a couple of relays to switch to linear on those rails when the pc has booted.  There are plenty of problems with that approach but it does work in a fashion and the guys doing it do report positive results.  Up until the last week I had no idea how to implement the ATX startup logic in a bespoke psu...but now that I do know how to do this we can get rid of the picoPSU and the ATX SMPS.

Cheers,

Anthony

Yes...the grounding...has me a little worried as well.  When I put four rails into the motherboard and 'tricked' the XXHE PC into starting up without the ATX procedure I may or may not have been lucky with the grounding of the separate pins on the P24 socket (the P8 socket may not be so bad because it has a single 12V rail and its own dedicated grounding wires).  The P24 socket has a number of ground wires but there is no mention of grounding in the ATX power specifications, so I have no idea which ground wire/s needs to be paired with which positive wire/s let alone which rails.  I suspect that it may not matter so much because of one simple observation that I have made...that each of the three main power rails into the P24 socket (3.3V/5V/12V) has multiple wires in the connector, but the computer will post/boot/play music with ANY single one of them powered, which indicates to me not only that the multiple wires for each rail are connected on the mobo side of the P24 socket, but that the grounds are connected also, because if the grounds were not connected current would not flow and the computer would not run.

The grounding issue then becomes less a 'within the individual wires of each rail' problem and more a 'between the separate rails' concern which thankfully may be much easier to test/tweak/solve.  The fact that I randomly chose which ground wires within the P24 socket to pair with each rail of power fed into that socket and I got it to work first go suggests that it is not necessarily a major issue in getting the motherboard to function, but I agree that some noise measurements would be useful to determine if changing the grounding pins to each rail affects performance.

Anthony