Power Supply Measurements

Have just finished replacing the dead Bestec 250W supply in and E-Machines with a 300W jeantec ( my stock stanby). I seem to do alot of these.

Anyway while it is soak testing on the power meter I though some Geeks may be interested in a few measurements since there have been several power supply questions lately.

E-Machines 2.6G Celeron, 256M memory, floppy, 80G hard drive, 2 DVD drives
(Fairly typical)

Bootup uses 80W to 100 Watts

Display Desktop not action 60W to 80W

Play CD 80W


Comment?

Studio T

 

Interesting studiot. I've just replaced a power supply in one of my PC's and had to replace the 250W with a 450W as I couldn't get anything smaller. That PC ran 2 80Gb HDs and 1 CDRW and I DVD player + floppy + a couple of extra cooling fans I'd fitted on the 250W supply for about 5 years (and was on virtually permanently) before it failed. Your figures seem to indicate that some of the super huge PSUs may be a bit of overkill.

 

They are only over kill if you dont have a "high-end" rig. so if you are into gaming and you need the best you deffinatly need that overkill

 

It's all to do with peak demand. Thrash a graphics card (or two =SLI) hard, with lots of rendering and the peak current goes up and stays up. Also many more devices are using the 12volt rails (hence the auxiliary connectors) which multiplies the potential power take.

I was hoping to stimulate a more lively debate considering we are all accepting power supply sizes equivalent to a modest electric fire bar, which no one would dream of leaving on the way we leave computers on.

Studio T

 

But evn then what are you actually using whilst gaming? The CPU, the graphics card, RAM, HD and ethernet card (maybe). I'd bet even on maximum load they don't get any where near 300W.

In fact having typed that I googled and found this which seems to back me up to a certain degree.