A question about PSU and power consumption
I have a silent Seasonic 460W PSU powering a i5-4570s and a GTX 750 Ti on a Gigabyte GA-H97-HD3 motherboard. I need to build another config for myself and I was wandering how much stronger a PSU to buy just in case I decide to upgrade my main computer to a GTX 760 or 770. So I bought a power consumption meter and I was in shock. My current config only draws 120-130W while running the Beta 1.04 with full settings. And that's total power drawn by the PSU, not only the power delivered to the system.
On idle (an open webpage and an mp3 playing in the background) the system drew 45W.
To be fair, I also ran prime95 on all 4 cores and got about 115-120W, so that's the max power draw of the CPU + RAM + chipset on something that's designed to torture them as much as possible.
Part of this is that I have a low power CPU (that's the "s" in 4570s) and a low power GTX. But it still leaves over 300W from the 460W PSU I have. That means that I can easily put a GTX 770 and not worry about a stronger PSU, hell even a GTX 780 might be possible.
Am I missing something here? Is the power meter I bought lying? Why is nVidia recommending a 600W PSU for the GTX 780? Is it just to make sure there is enough headroom for the rest of the system? If so, what combination of CPU+RAM+MB+other will draw the 300W that would fill up a 600W PSU? Not to mention the 1200W PSUs I saw in catalogues.
I have a silent Seasonic 460W PSU powering a i5-4570s and a GTX 750 Ti on a Gigabyte GA-H97-HD3 motherboard. I need to build another config for myself and I was wandering how much stronger a PSU to buy just in case I decide to upgrade my main computer to a GTX 760 or 770. So I bought a power consumption meter and I was in shock. My current config only draws 120-130W while running the Beta 1.04 with full settings. And that's total power drawn by the PSU, not only the power delivered to the system.
On idle (an open webpage and an mp3 playing in the background) the system drew 45W.
To be fair, I also ran prime95 on all 4 cores and got about 115-120W, so that's the max power draw of the CPU + RAM + chipset on something that's designed to torture them as much as possible.
Part of this is that I have a low power CPU (that's the "s" in 4570s) and a low power GTX. But it still leaves over 300W from the 460W PSU I have. That means that I can easily put a GTX 770 and not worry about a stronger PSU, hell even a GTX 780 might be possible.
Am I missing something here? Is the power meter I bought lying? Why is nVidia recommending a 600W PSU for the GTX 780? Is it just to make sure there is enough headroom for the rest of the system? If so, what combination of CPU+RAM+MB+other will draw the 300W that would fill up a 600W PSU? Not to mention the 1200W PSUs I saw in catalogues.
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