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Alternat use for power supply

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Davor

Junior Member
My goal is to hook up a car amplifier to a regular wall outlet. Considering the amplifier runs at 300 watts RMS, I need a pretty good amount of power. I have done this once before using a cheap old computer power supply but it was for a much weaker amp. What I did was cut all the positive power wires and connected them together. Then did the same with the ground/negative wires. Because I only ran it for a few minutes at max, I was unable to see if there was any possible long-term damage to the power supply or the amp. I don't really know much about how exactly the power supplies work so I was hoping someone would be able to give me some help on this. Thanks.
 
i was thinking the same thing, i think a nice antec truepower 430 can supply on the 12v lead enough power to run a 300 watt amp. you only want to use the 12v lead and the ground lead. nothing else.
 
Hrm... good question. Could you get all 300 watts through just the 12 v lines. I don't know. To tell the truth, I bet you can run your PSU and amp like this for a long time without problems. RMS is for the max volume... usually people can't stand listening to their setup that loud (except to "test" it out).
 
It will work, although not necessarily very well.

You are unlikely to get full power out of the amp (many car amps actually need about 14 V to get full power).

However, if you tried, you may run into the limit of the PSU. A typical 300 W PSU will have about 130 W capacity on the 12 V supply.

You've then got the problem of even supplying that - A computer PSU's main output is 5 V and 3.3 V, and it is by generating and regulating them that the other voltages are generated. In order to get power out of 12 V, the PSU has to be working the 5 V and 3.3V lines hard. If you apply a heavy load to 12 V without an adequate load on 5 V or 3.3 V then the voltage on the 12 V supply will drop through the floor.

I suspect though, that you will get satisfactory performance, at 'normal' listening levels.
 
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