Power Draw

gropingmantis · 26 Jun 2011 at 23:33

Quick question. Is power drawn from the wall indicative of the power required by your PC?

I recently bought a power monitor and no matter what I do I cant get my rig to pull more than 260 Watts from the wall.

When I put my specs into a PSU Wattage calculator I tells me I should be using a 400W PSU minimum.
Now, I realise that these calculators can be a bit off but that seems a long way off.

gropingmantis · 26 Jun 2011 at 23:41

But does that mean I could happily use a 300W PSU??

gropingmantis · 26 Jun 2011 at 23:50

Wait what? But Watts is a measure of power and Voltage is a measure of energy transfer and the equation is P=IV so surely the Wattage from the wall varies with the current that your hardware is drawing and more or more power hungry hardware = more current drawn = more power from the wall? Surely?

gropingmantis · 27 Jun 2011 at 00:03

Ah ok thanks. Crazy how little power my PC consumes. Even with a high end graphics card.

gropingmantis · 27 Jun 2011 at 00:18

panyan said:
with a lower power psu, usually it is less efficient as it is geared at a budget market so you;d have to take into account the increased inefficiency of the more budget psu

Yes I was curious as after selling my AX 850 I am back on my CX 400 and was looking for another PSU as the CX 400 only has one 6+2 pin PCI power cable.

If I were to overclock my CPU (i5-2500K) and get a silly powerful GPU (580 or whatever the new one will be GTX680???) do you reckon I would ever go over 500W?

I've been looking at the FSP Aurum series as they are 80+ Gold and can fit in an SG07/08 and they come in 400, 500, 600 and 700 Watt flavours and I wasn't sure which one to get. Thats why I bought the power monitor and was stunned by how little power was using even whilst trying to burn a DVD, run Prime and Furmark all at the same time.