hi all, a m8 of a m8 says that i should sell my tagan TG1300BZ and get a 750w or 800w as my tagan is unreliable and could damage my rig by being too much overkill or if the tagan fails ?????is he right or pulling my leg cheers guys take care
The components will only take the power they need. Never heard of a power supply being too much, other than in terms of efficiency. The only problem you will have is not drawing enough power to make it sit within its most efficient. I can imagine if it failed massively and spiked all of the power it could produce then you would have a problem. But in reality any power supply (that can power your rig) could spike enough power to kill all your components. Are you sure he isn't just wanting to buy it off you? One more reason that you shouldn't trust him, you wouldn't even need a 750 or 800 watt psu... Everyone over specs their psu, its about getting it in a perfect range for being the most efficient for most of the time while having good headroom.
hi m8 thanks for the reply, not sure, he just said you could get £70 for it if you sell it and get a 750w or 800w, if i add cash to it thanks m8, i think ill be safe lol, take care
I'd give you £70 for it As said 700~800 is plenty. I'm running OC'd I7 and X58 + 2x gtx280 + 6GB 1600MHz DDR3 + 2HD's + 6 large fans + 18wat water pump + bits on a 850wat PSU and I won't be pushing it at full tilt. I think you'd only need 1000 + wats for, heavy OC'd I7, multiple pumps, Dual x2's, Multiple HD's, TEC's on a £1500+ machine
Just as an afterthought (rather an after"post"), I've always gone by the principle that you buy a PSU that is 15-20% more power than you literally need. One reason would be upgrades. Or even new builds. Yeah, you could probably save a buck now by getting a "smaller" one, but in the future when you need or want a larger one, the money saved is now money wasted. Another reason is that not enough power is far worse than too much. As stated before, the components will draw what they need.
For argument's sake: Let's say you draw 650W at peak usage. Stressing a 700W PSU at near-maximum power draw as opposed to using a 1000W means your 700W will degrade much faster; the 1000W will only be spending its life running at half power so the stress on it is much less, therefore it will last longer. There's no such thing as too much power... unless surge protection fails.
Good Point. +rep I'm happy with my 850w, all my device are plugged and for him it's like a Health walk . My previous Psu was a 500w and it worked hard to do the same job
Too much power is a wierd subject, some will say it's complete overkill and you should only get a 700w max and some would say get as high as possible for future upgrades, personally I buy for noise, I got a X-750 which is currently used to power my P4 rig (with no fan spinning thanks to the low load) but the max I'll stress it is gonna be with a 3.5GHz (maybe even 3.2GHz) i5 750 with 4GiB of RAM, 2x GTX360's (although highly unlikely, more like 1) with a sound card, 1 DVD writer, 1 Blu-Ray reader and maybe a couple of hard drives, so all in all it's probably gonna struggle to get past 550W at max load but I got it for it's high efficiency and it's extremely low noise at up to about 400W~. So I would keep your Tagan and not sell it, you can never supply too much power for a machine as it will only take what it feels like taking. Headroom is always nice and if you decide you want to get a server mobo and 2 Opterons and overclock them to 4GHz you'd still have plenty of headroom
thank you guys, its great to hear other peoples opinions, ill be keeping my tagan as no daubt in the future ill get another 5870 and cf them. take care all
Your theoretical system would need to be running a pair of 5970s to get anywhere near that sort of peak power usage. That aside, a peak power usage would 650W would probably mean that when you were gaming you would be using in the order of 400W to 500W and web browsing is likely to be just over 200W. Typically a PSU works at its greatest efficiency when it is running at between 40% and 60% so if you were to put a 1000W PSU in your system, it would struggle to reach the maximum efficiency of the PSU. The other thing to consider is that a good quality PSU is designed to operate continuously at its rated power capacity so really by significantly underrating it there isn't anything to be gained in extending the PSU lifetime. On the other hand you will have spent extra on purchasing it and it will cost a little bit more to run. So yes there is such a thing as too much power. Edit: Storm's point about increasing the PSU rating for applications where fan noise is an issue is a good one and if you were building a HTPC, for example, it may be sensible to slightly over-rate your PSU to keep it as quiet as possible.
Nope, usually around 50%. Typically the efficiency will drop off a bit above 80% and below 20%. Have a look at the specifications tab on the Enermax Revolution as an example.
My theoretical example was a bit extreme but I figured 1000w was a good round number to go for. As for efficiency, it does vary from PSU to PSU, the higher quality ones are more than happy to output at near-maximum for as long as you need them to; try do that with a cheap, badly built PSU and expect crashes aplenty. At the end of the day, I'd rather know I have more power than I need, than need more power than I have.
