News Intel PC powered by car battery

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/08/23/intel_pc_car_battery/

 

Well the car battery thing is a decent idea, assuming it's designed to charge back up when the AC isn't all dead. Of course... it'll last all of maybe three minutes with a preshott. I think the only time I've tried system restore it made things ten times worse.... so I'd rather not be able to do it by accident.

 

give me some high wattage resistors to use as voltage dividers, and i could do the same thing. just need a 12 v line, a 5 v line (maybe a 7 and 3.3 volt as well) and some capacitors. as far as being able to power a processor for only 3 minutes, my 12 volt battery in my car can power my lights, stereo, and 2 300 watt amps, so i don't think its an issue.

has anyone ever picked up a car battery? they weigh about 20 lbs. no thanks on that mod.

 

Yea the mod is simple but when you are dealing with a country whose power goes on and off more than hollywood marriages and the average income is only a few months rent,(here in the states anyway, you need cheap simple soltutions. brilliant idea hope it helps out people who normally couldn't use a pc because of power issues.

 

brilliant would be making it run off a cell phone battery or a few 9v batteries (obviously the cicuitry gets more complicated when u have to go from 9v to 12 v)

 

Wouldn’t this really revolutionize in-car computers???

 

Yeah, that’s nice and all, but why not just take a normal computer, rip the circuitry out of a normal UPS (or in intel's case, build the PCB and other bits), hook it up to a car battery, and bingo: cheap UPS with lots o juice.

Believe it or not, but a car battery will actually power a typical computer for longer then a lot of the more expensive UPS's actually do. Friend of mine runs an inverter in his van, and with his system (2.8 p4, 2 hdd, 2 optical, 6600gt, 350watt psu) and his monitor (15"), and the battery will last (with the van off and the dome light on) roughly half an hour or more.




This is far from break-through; it's just hype and a way to make money. And yes, it will be good for those that don't know what they're doing, and I congratulate intel on making it, but it could have been implemented in such a better, more cost-effective way.

 

Powering a PC with a UPS is very inefficient, basically because the UPS circuitry goes from DC to AC (inefficiencies in the inverter) then the PC goes from AC back to DC (with more inefficiencies in the PSU).
What Intel have done is strip out the conversion stages, and provide 12V straight to the power circuits (which is the same thing that happens with SFF PCs that use an external power brick).
Not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination...

 

What's so inovative about this? There are plenty of DC/DC power supplies for PC's out there.. One such supply is a 90watt dc/dc 6-24v input for 69usd. There are actually many companies that make atx spec dc/dc psu's out there. Now, having said that, these won't charge the battery(s) up while on mains power.

 

Great! Just keep children away from it, because you know they will press it.