October 29, 200916 yr I'm using a Thermaltake fanless PSU (350watt) with 6x500gb, Xeon 3.2, and 2gb of ram and it only pulls 172watts (220 during spinup) as shown by my Kilowatt gadget. Why do people need these 600 and 800 watt power supplies? What am I missing?
October 29, 200916 yr Another 14 drives and a cpu that draws more power. That's just for unraid. If you are talking about a gaming PC then a current video card or two will really draw some power.
October 29, 200916 yr I'm using a Thermaltake fanless PSU (350watt) with 6x500gb, Xeon 3.2, and 2gb of ram and it only pulls 172watts (220 during spinup) as shown by my Kilowatt gadget. Why do people need these 600 and 800 watt power supplies? What am I missing? Run your Xeon 3.2 at full speed with mprime or something, you will see the wattage jump. I know my dual 3.2Ghz xeon with 4 IDE & 2 10,000 RPM scsi drives would idle at 160 watts, but jump between 350&400 watts when I started to do high cpu work. So you need the cushion there otherwise there will be other trouble. Also consider that 6 drives is not that many, Triple that and the wattage needed for spinup increases quite a bit. A 600watt single rail power supply is good enough for 15-18 drives and modest CPU usage. I think people who use the 800 & higher are over sizing or planning for future use with higher utilization. I did buy a 620 watt corsair, but I also plan to support 20 drives one day.
October 29, 200916 yr Some idea on high/low tdp of the main power consumers in a modern pc. cpu 4w 230 atom, xeon 3.2 dual core 150w. gpu gtx285 225w, geforce 8300 igp 25w. hdd 7200rpm 30w startup, 5400rpm green 7w. mb 10w-60w optical drive - 20w-48w psu 600w/82% = 130w, 57w/82% = 15w. A dual cpu xeon with 20 7200 hdd and a gtx285 needs 1200w psu for startup. A dual 2650e amd with 6 7200 hdd and igp will startup with a 120w psu.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.