gagnonrich opened this issue on Apr 15, 2008 ยท 27 posts
ghonma posted Sat, 19 April 2008 at 6:56 PM
Quote - Is there a site that shows the watts used per component so that I can add what I've got and decide if I want to upgrade the power supply?
A bit of googling will turn up a few, but those sites can be pretty misleading. They base their calculations purely on the wattage of each device, which is fine in theory but falls apart in practice
See, the only real 'power' you have to worry about is the +12V line in your PSU. This line drives all the juice chugging devices in your system, including the CPU, the HDDs, Burners and of course any GPUs you have. If this line doesn't have enough Amps in it to provide for your system, then it doesn't matter how much wattage your PSU is, it wont be able to drive all your components. And unfortunately this is exactly where a lot of cheap PSU makers skimp on. Even worse, PSUs tend to lose wattage over time, so a 'just there' PSU can degrade to 'useless' with time.
Ideally for a quad core and any of the newer GPUs you want a PSU that has at least 35A-40A. 30A is pushing it but can work if you never plan to overclock. Any less is not a good idea. All good PSUs have their Amps clearly listed on a label on the side / in the info on their website. That's the first place to check if you need to upgrade or not.