Corsair 520HX pretty hot

[Giskhin]

My cpu isn't going to be here until Monday so I put my psu and graphics card (8800GTS overclocked) into my sister's emachine. Should the power supply be hot to the touch?

 

[mpilchfamily]

PSUs do get pretty hot. As long as the PSU fan doesn't look like its spinning too slow then you are fine.

 

[Farmer]

What's the efficiency of that PSU? Like, 80%? Say your system needs 200W. Your PSU will draw 250W. That means 50W is going to heat.

Let's do some idealized speculation. It's akeen to your PSU shell being a perfect 288-Ohm resistor, and you put a 120V potential across it, and just let it dissipate. You get 50 J/s in heat. Say ideally this is dissipated evenly everywhere. Say your PSU has mass 2000g and is made of pure aluminum. Specific heat of aluminum is 0.9 J/g K, or 1800 J/PSU K, which means, if your PSU is in vacuum, that your PSU will heat up at 0.03 Kelvin per second. (Counting air cooling, it will do so until it reaches equilibrium logarithmically, which is some point higher than the temperature of the air).

So yeah, it gets hot.

 

[lenjack]

Farmer...What about the veeblefetzer coefficient?