October 1, 20169 yr Running the following hardware on a 650W Seasonic: Supermicro 24 Bay Case with Backplane ASRock RP2C602 Dual Xeon E5-2670's 64GB ECC Memory 4 Port Intel NIC 3 4TB HGST Drives 2 1TB WD Drives I am looking to add 2-4 more drives to add more space + dual parity. I am also going to setup 3-4 VM's with several dedicated video cards. Looking to see what wattage PSU would work best moving forward? I don't mind buying a large one now and growing into it.
October 1, 20169 yr Yes, I'd go with a larger supply. While your CPU's will rarely draw their max 115w TDP, you DO want to have that power available, just in case -- and if you're running multiple VM's with graphics cards you may indeed get close when they're under heavy load. In addition, the motherboard will likely draw 40-80 watts ... so the motherboard/CPU/RAM draw can easily be 300w total under heavy load. Video cards under load will draw within a wide range -- 30-40 watts for a low end card ranging up to over 200 watts or more for a high end card. If you have 3 mid-range cards installed, they could easily draw 300-400 watts when under load. And that doesn't count the hard drives !! These typically don't draw a lot ... modern drives are in the 5-6 watt range, with significantly higher spinup draw (which you can generally ignore with a high-end setup, since they're not likely to be spinning up while you're also drawing max loads on the CPUs and GPUs, so you'll have plenty of available power). Bottom line: For the system you're describing, I'd go with a high quality 850w PSU if you're planning to use low-to-mid range graphics cards; or a 1KW unit if you plan to use high-end graphics cards. Get a quality unit -- the power supply is NOT something you want to skimp on. These would be good choices: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139083 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151160 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139082
October 1, 20169 yr Author Thank you, Gary, for the reply! I thought it was time for an upgrade, just wanted to make sure that I get one big enough to handle it all.
October 1, 20169 yr While I would agree you don't want to skimp out when it comes to power supplies, I would advise you get a cheap kilowatt meter on Amazon and check what you will draw for not just watts but more specifically, amps. Not to disagree with garycase but 90% of people buying power supplies go way way way over on what the actually need. Bigger isn't always better and in most cases is overkill and not even within the power supplies efficiency band. While my set up is different, I only pull about 150 watts at idle (all drives spun up) on my SM 846 running 24 WD reds. Mine are just media servers so I don't run VMs or have multiple GPU's. Just giving you an idea of what I have for reference. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
October 1, 20169 yr Agree most folks tend to err on the high side ... and that costs a bit in efficiency with modern 80+ certified units, which don't run at peak efficiency at very low loads. However, the Platinum-certified units I suggested are over 90% efficiency within the 80+ bands (20% up) and are still well over 80% even at loads as low as 5%. ... and you DO want to have enough total capacity to handle the maximum possible load your system might present, even if it's very rare that it will hit those peaks. I agree the system will likely idle in the 100-150w range, but the more important statistic is what CAN it draw ... and with potentially 3 (or even 4) video cards plus 2 high-TDP processors, this could easily pull significantly more.
October 2, 20169 yr While I would agree you don't want to skimp out when it comes to power supplies, I would advise you get a cheap kilowatt meter on Amazon and check what you will draw for not just watts but more specifically, amps. Not to disagree with garycase but 90% of people buying power supplies go way way way over on what the actually need. Bigger isn't always better and in most cases is overkill and not even within the power supplies efficiency band. While my set up is different, I only pull about 150 watts at idle (all drives spun up) on my SM 846 running 24 WD reds. Mine are just media servers so I don't run VMs or have multiple GPU's. Just giving you an idea of what I have for reference. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Keep in mind the Kill-A-Watt measures AC 120V watts, and the PC is DC 3.3V, 5V, 12V.
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