Blogs Does anyone really need a 1Kw PSU?

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/05/07/does-anyone-really-need-a-1kw-psu/

 

/waits for Star "z0mg-I-can't-believe-you-can-power-anything-more-than-a-pocket-watch-with that-500W-PSU" Dagger

 

Anyone that uses a recent nVidia GPU.

 

Personally, I prefer putting in a more powerful PSU than is absolutely necessary purely because it should hopefully be less stressed and therefore more likely to last longer.

The Antec PSU calculator (on their site) would also support this view, because they say that due to capacitor aging, the PSU loses its maximum capacity over time.

 

SLI Fermi anyone?

 

And it has nothing at all to do with wanting to sell more expensive, higher rated PSUs?

It would help if you read the blog post.

 

I've always found the Extremeoutervision PSU calculator to be a good starting point: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp it recommends 558W for a system like this, if you take ageing into account and put it in a fairly restrictive case, then put the PC under a desk and the desk in the hottest room in the house on the hottest day of the year and 550W will not be enough and you'd risk it burning out during a long gaming session, take ageing into account and it gets worse.

 

@smc8788

You should read it too, and MORE articles - running a PSU at near full load isn't very healthy, and stressing it so much may lead to early failure...

 

But would you really need a 1kW PSU?

 

The enlarged images aren't working for me, are they working for anyone else?

 

404

A decent 1kW unit is recommended minimum for GTX480SLi

 

One review site (cant remember which) tried triple SLI 480's and an intel extreme CPU and it under full synthetic load reached 1007w. But the number of people who buy 700w+ PSU's and then put them in systems that will never reach more than 450-500w is funny. I know someone who put a 900w corsair PSU in a system that had a i7-750 and 5850. He said "but im gunna overclock it so i need the headroom". Lol.

 

I'm running what most people would consider as too much on my HX620 (SLI'ed 260 GTX cards) and I've had no stability issues, even looping Crysis benchmarks. So yes, death to the PSU exagerators!

 

Pretty much no-one needs a 1kw PSU.

I've got a Corsair 750w in my rig - works perfectly. Mine only draws about 400w at max load

 

I ran my OC'ed PII 965 + CF'ed 4770 + 10x 120mm fans + 3HDD + 2SSD.. on a 425W PSU lol..
still enough power but its already on 90% side..

 

Running stable for a day is one thing, how about a year? Surely running at 90%+ capacity will cause the PSU to die quicker, still be less efficient than running at a lower capacity and limit upgrades.

Great PSU tho don't get me wrong but I'd still rather have that overhead and not 300W+ overhead but 600W is more than enough.

 

"but after dropping nearly a ton on graphics cards"

But a ton is £100?

 

My computer has never drawn more than about 240W from the wall, yet my Seasonic 420W PSU would struggle to cope - I particularly noticed this on cold boots when the fans wouldn't spin up fully and the lights stayed dim. The trouble with smaller PSU's is that they have little current available to the lower voltage rails, so if you have a lot of hard drives, fans and/or drive bay devices you can max out some of the rails before reaching the maximum rated power.

Really though you never need more than about 550-750W unless you're running SLi with those egg friers nVidia released recently.

 

600w is perfectly MORE than enough for single card configurations. by enough, i mean keeping the load under 60%.

800w is perfectly more than enough for dual card configuration except for Fermi.

it's all about planning ahead, if you don't plan, then buy a 1kW supply and watch it go to waste with really bad efficiency due to not at optimum 50% load.

 

I tend to calculate what a build will need, and then add 50-100W headroom depending on what kind of use it will see.

I do think people go way ottt though, talking of having a big psu so they can upgrade in the future, when in all likelihood that isn't going to happen, and really they just want to buy 'the best' hardware for bragging rights.

My gaming pc has dual gtx 260s, and I've been running it with a 620w PSU for over a year so far, so I'm certainly of the mind that you don't need a massive power supply. I have friends with single graphics cards with bigger PSUs than me, and I really don't understand their logic.