The Black Art of Dual PSUs in Your Enthusiast PC

Introduction

Today, we are covering a group of products that all share one goal in common; running two power supplies in your PC system at once. The topic of running dual power supplies is one that comes up in the [H]ardForum with a good bit of regularity and the topic generally revolves around the concept of buying, or using, two less expensive power supplies in tandem to power your enthusiast rig instead of buying a more expensive PSU. With such a group of enthusiasts who are constantly pushing their systems to run faster, it really comes as no surprise that the enterprising spirit of making do with what you have on hand would turn its eye toward powering enthusiast PC systems in need of massive power making the concept of running two power supplies of significant interest.

Now while this dual PSU concept and the many DIY methods for accomplishing this are not new, it is a subject we have only briefly touched on before when we reviewed the ePower Juice Box 450W Auxiliary Power Supply. Surely, some readers will ask, "Why bother buying a product when I can do this myself?" and many of our readers fit firmly into that group. There are however more than a few reasons and applications where buying one of these products makes sense. We will cover some of those particular concepts throughout this article. Let's now take a look at some of the ready-made products on the market for accomplishing this task.

Double Team!

We will be looking at four different products and methods for running two power supplies at once. These will include the following:

1) Add2Psu

2) Lian Li Secondary Power Supply Starter Kit

3) Auxiliary Power Supply

4) Redundant Power Supply

These four options we are covering today include a range of price points, potential applications, and vendors. Some of these applications will be more broadly applicable than others, but all of these products fit into the niche of running dual power supplies in a system. The vendors of these products range from the very new and small, to the very large and well known. However, while we have selected four products these are NOT all that exist in the market, and these were selected for their representation of the range of different methods and applications included in running dual power supplies only. Additionally, we only selected products that result in dual power supply operation without the intervention of the user at start up beyond what they would normally do when hitting a single power button on their case.

Let’s first move on to see the Add2Psu to see what this product is and how this product integrates into a users system.