Thinking about this lot, 2 questions 650w PSU ok
When I bought my last PC, I couldn't find anywhere that suggested which power supply size I would need. I have no idea how people come up with the power consumption figure.
Theoretically you could add up the motherboard, memory, CPU, video card, disks, but you'd have to look deep into the specs of each component to do that and it might be average and not peak. And if it was peak then how likely are you to need peak of all components at the same time? You'd think people would be talking about it a lot but there's nothing. Folks seem to guess. I expect they guess much too high in most cases* because their super-duper PC must need allll the power.
The CPU takes 65W and the video card takes 175W... or does it? "
Requirements
- Minimum of a 550 Watt power supply.
- One available 8-pin PCIe power dongle
- Total Power Draw : 175 Watts
That makes no sense whatsoever. Or maybe they're saying a PC takes 375W without the video card? But how can they possibly know how many hard-drives etc. you've got?
The motherboard doesn't list a power draw anywhere, even though the chipset gets hot so it must take at least a few watts. The SSD takes 9W and the HDD 4W, which are trivial.
So far as I can see, you'd be safe with a 275W power supply, which is smaller than anyone sells, for a medium high-range PC, which makes absolutely no sense so it must be wrong.
But then maybe the power supply rating is optimistic, even though it's tech-specs do list it as 650W continuous power. In which case you've really got no way of knowing what size you need.
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* On the Apollo spacecraft, the toilet arrangements were by way of a condom-like device with an attached pipe. They came in three sizes and astronauts always chose a size too big. The people who had to clean the suits after training sessions called them "wet-backs".
