[citation][nom]razor512[/nom]Whats the point of building a gaming PC that needs a 1000 watt PSU?The crazy high power consumption comes from the use of end of life chip technologies.When you start to push the limits of a chip design, you start to get very high power consumptions.A videocard setup that would need 700+ watts on it's own will be easily beaten by a low power mid range videocard a year or so from now.Game makers also do not target super high end so it is mostly for bragging rights to have a overkill system.The only times when overkill comes in handy is when doing stuff like running games that are more considered to be technology demos on a 30 inch display or better yet, across 3 of them.[/citation]
Because PSUs are at their most efficient when they're under a load of half their rating. So, if you're rig is pulling around 500 to 600W, a 1k PSU will be, depending on it's efficiency rating, giving you the maximum efficiency of converting wall power to usable power for the system (so, say you have a gold PSU that is rated for 90% efficiency, that means that at 500W for the system, you're pulling 550W from the wall). When you're closer to the high end on the load (say 500W and using a 600W PSU), you system is less efficient and draws more power from the wall (for the same gold PSU, because you're over the 80% load amount for the PSU, that means you're usually losing a few percent in efficiency so instead of being 90% efficient, you're probably 86% to 87%, which means you draw 565W from the wall instead of 550W if you were using a 1k PSU at the half load area). And lets not forget, with a 1k PSU, you have headroom to add more things then with a tighter PSU for your system requirements (like upgrading the video cards, newer cards may draw more power and may require you to get a new PSU if you're tight where as a 1k PSU wouldn't even blink).