Working within power limits

Grimgoth · 14 May 2009 at 11:50

Thinking of moving down in size from a mATX to an ITX with that nice zotac mobo. However, I notice that most of them cases don't take a standard ATX power supply; I think the In Win cases that OcUK have are with a mATX 120 W power supply. I've had the occasion to try and source one of these, and I think they go up to about 270 W.
Therefore it is now quite essential that we work within a set amount of power, and now my question is:
How do I find out (easily) what kind of power each component needs?

Grimgoth · 15 May 2009 at 11:24

Hmm, thanks for the calc mr.white, at least its conservative ballpark estimate... it wants 350W for the system i was thinking of:
a zotac mITX with wi-fi, a q6600 energy efficient 95W SLACR (whats the normal quad core rating?), two sticks of RAM, 1 7200rpm notebook drive (or a 32gb ssd), a blu-ray disc player (do the notebook ones draw less power?) one case fan (i guess) and an external hard disk (but thats going to have its own power, so who cares)

edit: do you think the 120 W in win cases that OcUK have is going to be enough?

Grimgoth · 15 May 2009 at 15:14

right, now i am a bit confused-
as i understand it the 95W and 65W ratings of those chips are the TDP ratings- what amount of heat the cpu generates and your cooler needs to get rid of; I thought both would require roughly the same amount of volts/juice to keep going, and that the 65 W ones were just more efficient in the amount of heat generated due to using a smaller manufacturing process.

Grimgoth · 19 May 2009 at 12:42

Guardsmon said:
If you use a Q8200 you might be a little more lucky as they are the 45nm core which use 65W

Hmm, where did you find that a Q8200 uses 65W? I've done some digging and it looks like there are supposed to be energy efficient versions of all the quad processors coming out (with an S suffix, so Q8200S, Q9550S, etc), that are rated at 65W, but the normal versions of the Q8** series all are 95W, as far as I can see...