Is there a power supply unit that accepts 12v input instead of the standard 120v or 240v?
Is there a power supply unit that accepts 12v input instead of the standard 120v or 240v?
I'm looking to power my PC using a 12V battery, similar to a car or camping battery. I'm considering swapping my regular PSU for one that accepts 12V and uses standard cables, so it would work well.
EDIT: To be clear, I don't plan to plug the battery directly into my motherboard, HDD, or fan. Instead, I want to connect the battery to a 12V PSU first, then link that to the motherboard/HDD/Fan.
Perhaps, but you'd face several challenges:
If a short circuit happens on the 12V, the battery current can be significantly higher than from a PSU output, leading to more damage.
Voltage regulation is lacking, and many batteries have voltages above 13V during charging.
When the battery drains, it's unclear how the motherboard will respond—while a well-designed motherboard might shut down, this isn't typical for standard setups.
You're also missing other voltage levels; the power button connection in the PC case won't work properly, causing problems with startup and shutdown.
So, without a specially designed PSU for 12V battery input, it won't function correctly.
an excellent post
exists about clones of the Pico HD-Plex
200W DC-ATX converter on Aliexpress
Pico-Box
This sounds like an
XY problem.
Why do you want to do this?
Let's say a typical non-gaming PC uses 80W on average, between idle and high load. Camping batteries seem to cost in the region of £1 / Wh, give or take. So £300 to be able to run the PC for four hours before having to recharge the battery.
Car battery capacity is in Ah. It might seem like e.g. a 75 Ah battery will give you over ten hours of running, but they're designed to deliver high currents for short times (hence using Ah not Wh), so I strongly suspect the efficiency when supplying a dribble current is much lower. (Otherwise why would camping batteries offer so much less capacity for the same price?)
So you're talking a few hundred pounds/dollars minimum of battery to run a headless (no monitor) ATX PC for a couple of hours or so. I'll bet that whatever you're trying to do, there's a much easier way to achieve it.
Yep, if the OP is considering running their desktop PC off their car’s lead acid battery at a campsite then it’s a great way to sulfate it via deep discharge, and get stranded in the wilderness 🐻 Laptop, tablet, or 12V NUC seems more appropriate.
The powerStream solution is what I'm aiming for.
I'm considering installing a few solar panels on my roof, storing the energy in a power bank and then using it at 12v.
This approach avoids connecting to the city grid.
A 12v system seems secure, allowing me to handle the wiring myself.
However, converting between 12v and 240v, then back again, would reduce efficiency.
Sounds like a great off-grid project
Good luck, do share your progress as it sounds really interesting.
This tends to occur in business equipment. It also indicates these items are not inexpensive. We previously purchased DC power supplies for routers and servers, which were twice the cost of AC power—and both HP and Cisco charge substantial fees for their products. These were 48-volt units commonly found in telecom rooms that only provided DC power.
I explored similar options but found computer power supplies to be prohibitively expensive, so I opted against a ready-made solution. Eventually, I realized a laptop offered a simpler alternative since it was already DC-based. I still needed a DC/DC voltage converter because the laptop required 14 volts instead of the standard 12. Fortunately, I had the laptop available for free.
The solar industry offers various DC/DC power converters that enable voltage adjustments. I believe with enough effort, you could construct your own—simply disconnecting wires from an old AC supply and ensuring proper voltage levels on the correct terminals. This would involve some tedious soldering, wire crimping, and using a voltage meter.
Other than the need for 12V, efficiency isn't the best choice. In certain cases (like this one), solar inverter losses reach 97%. Combined with a platinum ATX PSU that performs around 90% across all loads, the overall efficiency comes to 87%. In contrast, the PowerStream only achieves 72% at full load (1000W), which is likely even lower at lower loads.