Question Curious about just how much my PSU really takes

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ragez0r

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Mar 9, 2012
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Hello, my name is Chris and I was born in the french arrogant part of Canada, but I moved to the Philippines a few months back and I'm trying to deal with the phenomenonal prices here, I found a desktop PC a8-7680 I think.. 16gb ram and 512gb SSD.. but the computer assembler put a 1000 watt PSU in it, God knows why... So here is my question because Many people know that Philippines suffers from something called "dirty electricity" means a lot of static in the power line, so I absolutely need a device called AVR... Automatic voltage regulator (don't quote me).. to keep the tower from launching out the window.... I just want to know .. do I need an AVR that can support the wattage of the PSU or just enough for the CPU, fan and SSD, which I estimated to be around 100 watts.. sorry. .. about my poor punctuation, thank you and merci
 
i doubt it's 100w in total. about 250 under full load. no you don't need to get a 1000w one. absolutely ridiculous. that's the rating that the PSU can handle, and what its max rated for. it doesn't consume that much power all the time.
 
Is the PSU really a 1000 watt PSU or a fake? What's the brand on the label? It would help to know what we're dealing with. I'm a bit skeptical that someone would install a PSU that's probably two or three times as valuable as the rest of the PC.
 
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DSzymborski said:
Is the PSU really a 1000 watt PSU or a fake? What's the brand on the label? It would help to know what we're dealing with. I'm a bit skeptical that someone would install a PSU that's probably two or three times as valuable as the rest of the PC.
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Chinese no name, smells like a Soviet munitions plant
 
zinkles said:
i doubt it's 100w in total. about 250 under full load. no you don't need to get a 1000w one. absolutely ridiculous. that's the rating that the PSU can handle, and what its max rated for. it doesn't consume that much power all the time.
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Thank you that was my first theory but i wanted to make sure that was no power surge or anything sort of like that
 
no. surges will not go above the max current the components are rated for.

ex: if the CPU has a max current draw of 100w (e.g.) then it will spike to around 100w only.
 
Be careful to not buy junk so called power surge protectors. What you likely want is as a UPS that has a AVR function and if the power gets to far out of spec it will just switch to battery for a short time.

First be careful when you look at UPS the big number they state is called VA. It is related to the watts but finding the actual watts they support is more important.

You can find the actual watts your computer is consuming with a device that has a popular brand called killawatt. There are cheaper clones. It should show you the watts/amps/volts you are using. My power city power is very clean so I mostly use it to tune the power output on my generator.

These cost between $20-$30 for most brands. Question is though if you are not going to use it again would you be better off just putting that money toward a better UPS to begin with. Many UPS will also show you things like voltages and power draw.

You might be better off just guessing your power usage. It is mostly your video card that takes power. My guess would be you could likely use what is called a 1000va UPS that can run say 750 watts. Check that it has the AVR feature.

If you can afford the difference I would try to get one that uses sine wave output. It only really matters for the time you are running on battery but modern power supplies to get the very efficient rating they do use need good sine wave signals. Some very high end ones when running at high utilization will turn off to protect themselves from damage.
 
I
zinkles said:
no. surges will not go above the max current the components are rated for.

ex: if the CPU has a max current draw of 100w (e.g.) then it will spike to around 100w only.
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Forgot to calculate the wattage of the 1tb hdd into my equation .. but hdd only take 5-10 watts really... I'm somewhat obsessed with wattage because I live on solar power here in Philippines
 
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ragez0r said:
I

Forgot to calculate the wattage of the 1tb hdd into my equation .. but hdd only take 5-10 watts really... I'm somewhat obsessed with wattage because I live on solar power here in Philippines
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It really sounds like you would put a "killowatt" type devices to more use than your average person. The fancy units can even upload data to a phone app to show you usage over a period of time. Most are still well under $50 for even the fancy ones.
 
bill001g said:
It really sounds like you would put a "killowatt" type devices to more use than your average person. The fancy units can even upload data to a phone app to show you usage over a period of time. Most are still well under $50 for even the fancy ones.
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The AMD I have is an apu, I honestly don't see myself needing a GPU as long as I have that Radeon R7 welded into the processor...
Unless I need it for Starfield, which I am anxious to try
 
Starfield runs like crap even on a 4090 unless you turn the setting down. I never saw any reviews that showed if starfield even runs on a machine without a dedicated gpu. Although they have patched it somewhat the game still runs very poorly for a game from such a large studio.

If you actually have your own solar power you might look for a DC power supply for the computer. That would save all the power lost converting it back and force to AC.

But on your original question I still suspect you are going to have to look at UPS that has a VA rating of at least 750 or 1000. This is mostly because the cheaper units do not have the AVR function. They pretty much only protect against total outages not dirty power.
 
bill001g said:
Starfield runs like crap even on a 4090 unless you turn the setting down. I never saw any reviews that showed if starfield even runs on a machine without a dedicated gpu. Although they have patched it somewhat the game still runs very poorly for a game from such a large studio.

If you actually have your own solar power you might look for a DC power supply for the computer. That would save all the power lost converting it back and force to AC.

But on your original question I still suspect you are going to have to look at UPS that has a VA rating of at least 750 or 1000. This is mostly because the cheaper units do not have the AVR function. They pretty much only protect against total outages not dirty power.
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You think a ups for my system would need to be 1000 watts? Does the PSU pulse the power inlet at 1000 watts or something ? This is becoming confusing
 
Well, there is a minimum cost to building a decent UPS, 1000 VA ones are quite expensive.

Since you are just using an APU, something like a 650VA would be plenty, you can even put your monitor on it.
 
It is highly unlikely the system you have would ever even for a short time draw 1000 watts.
Be very careful 1000 watts is not 1000 va. Maybe at first boot the cpu would pull its maximum power for a short time but that is still a tiny fraction of 1000 watts.

My guess would be you can get say a 750VA UPS which should have about a 500 watt rating.

The main issue you have is if you want a UPS that has the AVR feature. You will not find that feature on cheaper UPS.
 
bill001g said:
It is highly unlikely the system you have would ever even for a short time draw 1000 watts.
Be very careful 1000 watts is not 1000 va. Maybe at first boot the cpu would pull its maximum power for a short time but that is still a tiny fraction of 1000 watts.

My guess would be you can get say a 750VA UPS which should have about a 500 watt rating.

The main issue you have is if you want a UPS that has the AVR feature. You will not find that feature on cheaper UPS.
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My only dilemma is that all the lithium batteries china are producing today is absolute crap, I had a 12ah solar power bank and it died after 6 months only keeping a modem on.., at least I got a free solar panel out of it, as long as the PSU only draws 100-150watts I should be golden, thank you for all your help
 
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