How Powerful Of A PSU?

[cm30]

Hey guys. I was wondering, (not that I need to know this now, but just for general knowledge) how do you find out how many watts you need out of your PSU for your pc? Like how do you calculate it, in total? Thanks!

 

[iam2thecrowe]

there are some psu calculators that are available, but it only really gives a ballpark figure. It also depends on the quality of the psu. Why dont you just ask a more direct question. Let me know the full specs of the rig your trying to power and PSU budget and we can come up with some options. Always better to go more than you need than not enough though. If you flick through reviews of graphics cards and look at power draw under full load it often gives you a clue what you might need. You want to aim to have a psu with at least 30% more power than the actual peak power draw of your system, so not to run the psu near its max, as it will shorten the life of the psu and it will be noisy.

 

[MarkW]

With Nvidia cards, you can search for the GPU (GTX 960 for example) and Google will show you a link to geforce.com, and once there, you can select Specifications, and scroll down to recommended power supply and get anything higher than what they recommend.

For AMD, its a little harder since they do not list the power draw, so find a review on that card, and any decent reviewer will measure the amount of power the card draws. Some will report it as total system power draw at the wall, and others will report it as what the card itself draws, and if they do what the card draws, add about 200 watts to the card amount and you should be ok.

Obviously if you plan to overclock, run multiple video cards, or things like that you need to increase the power supply capacity to deal with those extra draw for those things.

 

[cm30]

there are some psu calculators that are available, but it only really gives a ballpark figure. It also depends on the quality of the psu. Why dont you just ask a more direct question. Let me know the full specs of the rig your trying to power and PSU budget and we can come up with some options. Always better to go more than you need than not enough though. If you flick through reviews of graphics cards and look at power draw under full load it often gives you a clue what you might need. You want to aim to have a psu with at least 30% more power than the actual peak power draw of your system, so not to run the psu near its max, as it will shorten the life of the psu and it will be noisy.

I know that my PSU is fine. Im wanting to know this for future reference. Im not talking about just graphics cards, I mean a whole rig.

 

[cm30]

With Nvidia cards, you can search for the GPU (GTX 960 for example) and Google will show you a link to geforce.com, and once there, you can select Specifications, and scroll down to recommended power supply and get anything higher than what they recommend.

For AMD, its a little harder since they do not list the power draw, so find a review on that card, and any decent reviewer will measure the amount of power the card draws. Some will report it as total system power draw at the wall, and others will report it as what the card itself draws, and if they do what the card draws, add about 200 watts to the card amount and you should be ok.

Obviously if you plan to overclock, run multiple video cards, or things like that you need to increase the power supply capacity to deal with those extra draw for those things.

I mean for a whole build, not just a GPU.