I've thought it'd be really cool to do a super thin 170 x 170mm PSU and have it do double duty as the motherboard tray.
I've also thought it'd be cool to make a 3D printed plate that fits in a PCIe slot (non conductive) and allows mounting for a couple of merged UHP-200-24 units or something.
I´ve had this idea also, but I´ve found two problems:
1.- cost, because of the super slim units I´ve found are either expensive or ultraexpensive (ac-dc unit from 170 to 500 euros between 500-700 watts and without filtering of any kind...)
2.- refrigeration, at 91% efficiency peak power (500w) you still have to deal with almost 50 watts of heat... which doesn´t sound good if you put it between the motherboard and the graphics card.
Right now I´m working on a pcb to build a ac-dc unit 500w which could measure around 120 mm x 100 ish mm (maybe more*) x 25-30 mm depending mainly on hold up time calculations and how expensive do I want that cap to be.... Initially I was thinking on a unit that has the footprint of a sfx psu but much slimmer, so you could put it in the same place as the original sfx psu and add a cuple of SSD in the same place, but my guess is that refrigeration is going to be a problem, and I´m willing to build a prototype to try it and see how it holds up being passive cooled.
* Maybe I need more room in here, but depends on the noise measurements we get... hold up time don´t worry me that much, and I´m planning on being lower than the 17 ms that the ATX standard requires, but noise and line voltage regulation are very important and those caps need room....
Because of the room constrains of this idea, I was thinking on doing it thicker but with less foot print, something around... 120 x 70 x 60 mm for a 500w unit. And in this size I think I can even put a 5vsb ac-dc converter so we can plug it to the 2427 and it would work as a normal psu.
BTW with something like 170 x 170 w 25-30 mm I think I could make a 1.000w unit but it would cost a fortune.
I´m already talking to some engineers I know that works on robotics stuff and know how to design a pcb (way better than me) and yesterday we were talking about having something working next month, but honestly I don´t know if I´m going to make more than one because just the parts I have to buy for the 500w ac-dc would cost like 250 euros + designing a cage or something... and a heatsink... so go an figure. It´s very small, but very expensive, In the first place I was doing it for fun, just to learn.
The good thing is that it efficient 93% peak at 60% load and 91% eff. full load, although just 80% eff. at 10% load. The 12v regulation is expected to be within 0.1 % because we have sense wiring on the pcb we are designing, and I think that´s great. Noise is supposed to be around 30 mv max, but thats theoretically talking, I won´t believe until it´s done.
