Keeping this build quiet and within the power limits of the pico psu are two of the most important parts of this build, as well as seeing if it can cope with a mildly overclocked 3770k.
As part of this I am trying to test everything for power consumption/noise before it goes in to the Cube.
Just been test running the Corsair pump and Alphacool radiator combination, along with the two Phobya fans hooked up to a simple Asetek fan controller (literally about £3 inc. postage).
Noise from the fans at full tilt is reassuringly loud with a good through breeze, but when I use the controller it can be turned down to something less than audible.
Power draw at the wall from the combination of pump, and two fans is 14w (inc the draw from the ATX PSU itself that I am testing them on) at max settings and goes down to around 9 or 10 at lower speeds. Disconnecting the fans and pump and measuring just the draw from the PSU with fan shows that as taking about 5 watts - so in reality my fans and pump combo is taking a max of about 9W.
Seems okay.
The only other power consumption apart from main board and processor will be by my
Toshiba SSD (that I think is supposed to be an incredibly small 1.5W) and a slot loader that supposedly will run from a single USB input and therefore about 2.5W max.
In theory then I should have a maximum of up to 130W allowable for the onboard consumption of CPU, board and RAM for any overclock experiments....
So far so good.