How Much Eletrical Power?

[Pitbul]

how can i tell how much electrical power my PC has such as watts u see some fo the new GPU's which need a certain ammount of Power to ensure the PC can run the card but how can ya tell how much power ur PC can pump thru itself to run a GPU such as the Geforce FX 5900 or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro?

[Amarjit]

The standard usage is, I think, 300W. But I have seen some 650W power supplies.

[Neo 721]

300 Watt is all you need for a desktop PC, 350 is the maxinum i would use, anything above that is unecesary and would make your electricity bill soar.

[balamm]

ummm I disagree. I run on a 400 watt supply and I wish I had more. I sometimes piggyback 2 to run under loads my 400 watt won't support. Better to have more than enough than to overwork something. Less heat, less stress on components, etc.

[3rd gen noob]

i have a 420w psu for my athlon. as balamm says, more is better is applicable to a point in this case

[lynx]

Originally posted by balamm@24 July 2003 - 12:22
ummm I disagree. I run on a 400 watt supply and I wish I had more. I sometimes piggyback 2 to run under loads my 400 watt won't support. Better to have more than enough than to overwork something. Less heat, less stress on components, etc.

Just a word of warning about piggybacking power supplies.

Unless they are actually designed for this, (if they are, there will be wires to connect the two supplies together) this is potentially dangerous and could severely overload one or both of the units.

If you are merely talking about a second supply to provide power to auxilliary units (disks, cd drives etc) then this is perfectly ok as long as you make sure that the zero volts is commoned, but it is not advisable to physically join the wires of two supplies together without synchronising their regulators.

[balamm]

I actually contacted the engineers at Macron in china about it. Unfortunately, they can't get beyond sinewaves to see simple economics.
I ended up wiring it with a relay so that it powers all my slave drives and CD burners, triggered by the main power supply. It works quite well and the drives open a lot faster. All automotive 12 volt parts. Quite cheap to do.

[3RA1N1AC]

300 or 350 ought to be fine for a normal desktop computer. even with 2 cd-roms, 2 or 3 hard drives, a couple of fans, and a high end GPU, you wouldn't max out a 300-350. just make sure it's a high quality, brand name power supply so it won't crap out when you get your games or programs going full bore.

400-600 isn't really necessary unless you're hooking up a lot of drives and fans.

also,

how can i tell how much electrical power my PC has such as watts

???

just open the computer and read what the power supply unit says? it isn't obvious?

[lynx]

Originally posted by balamm@24 July 2003 - 13:38
I actually contacted the engineers at Macron in china about it. Unfortunately, they can't get beyond sinewaves to see simple economics.
I ended up wiring it with a relay so that it powers all my slave drives and CD burners, triggered by the main power supply. It works quite well and the drives open a lot faster. All automotive 12 volt parts. Quite cheap to do.

What you've suggested sounds fine, I was pointing out the potential dangers of physically combining the power supplies to make a common bus. You can do this with PS that are specifically designed to do it.

I've been thinking about doing something similar to what you've suggested, but at input voltage level (triacs triggered by a commonly supplied signal such as keyboard clock) so that external devices (printer, speakers etc) are powered down when the system goes into standby/off mode.

If I get a working model, I'll post the circuit diagram.

[Pitbul]

Originally posted by 3RA1N1AC@24 July 2003 - 05:59
just make sure it's a high quality, brand name power supply so it won't crap out when you get your games or programs going full bore.

can anyone give me some names to look into for power supplies? im gonna be getting a FX5900 and it says it needs a 300w power supply to run efficiently.