As I told you I own a system with a 125TDP Quad, 4GB Ram, a HD4870 and some usual stuff plus things like a watercooling, dedicated sound card plus the usual USB devices taking energy. And all this with even less than pure 450 watt. So what's your point?


I just can give this back: Go back to my post where I'm talking of your recommendation of up to for something that's hardly a midrange system at best...


I just get the feeling you're bending everything you see to fit yourself. My entire point was about 500-600 watts being enough for a standard-SLI system which is perfectly proven by a triple CF or physical Quad-SLI system just draining something around 600 watts. With the 150+ watts a graphics card of that league drains you're perfectly fine with the watt range I recommended...

And no - I never said anything about a dual or triple SLI / CF running on a 400 watts system so please stop making it look like I did so...


That's quite an easy one and it has its roots back i nthe beginning around 2005 where the 12V rail problem was way more important than today and in order not to make people think that their years old PSUs with enough wattage would be fine they made up those high numbers so people would figure that they'd need a more powerful supply which like always came with more than enough power on their 12V rail...


That's why I said show some evidence of the watts a system takes to prove your point. Currently it's just I post a Computerbase link - you doubt it. Ventilator posts a Guru3D link - you doubt it. Lostclimate tells about a system which ran fine (although to be true the graphics card weren't that much of power eaters) - you doubt it...

To say the truth it currently has little sense to discuss with you as you simply doubt anything we can come up here with and maybe you don't even consider you being wrong. With such a position we'll never be able to convince you of anything because you already have made up your mind and we are wrong. I could give you dozens of links showing the exact same result, tell you about my experiences of recommending systems to people (and you even have EvilSOB's knowledge here which seems to know what he's takling about) but I doubt you'll won't just go ahead and doubt it...


Thank you for completely ignoring the 12v rail topic. But I guess you just doubt that there's some truth to them being important, right?


Thanks again for ignoring my system but well I guess you doubt I really own that at all, right?

Sorry if all this sounded a bit rude but I'm pretty sure all I got in response from you the last time also was a "I doubt" it which makes any discussion a bit ridiculous...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

i decided to get the 525W enermax because i am interested in larrabee and want some reserve for it in case i want to get one. the rumors about its power consumption are a bit contradictory. some say it will be power efficient, some say it will take 300W. hopefully not! that would be too much... :p

by the way my previous computer was a very small shuttle barebone with a 220W power supply. it was crammed (gf6600gt, 2 hds, 1 dvd-burner,...) and worked fine.

You surely implied so by stating that recommending more power for mid-range to higher end systems was a bad idea.



And your point being? Which Phenom do you have?



...add to this your 3D card and you're pretty much already close to the max of your power supply as it won't be 100% efficient. And that's exactly what I've been saying all along.

My entire point was around your recommendation of 500-750W for a system like Ventilator has and then saying SLI is 750+ watts. So please don't mix this with the SLI part of this topic...


If I understood you correctly your point was: "I had this system - had to buy 500+ watts PSU in order to make it run!". My point is: I have the said system which takes the same if not even more than yours and I have even less than your "Minimum-Prediction" of 450 watts...

My CPU is a Phenom 9850 BE...


Well at first you have to subtract the inefficency that already is in those values which easily will make numbers go down by 20-30% and after adding up like 150 watts for a good GPU I'd still be fine (would be nice if you'd give a link as to where you got this from so we can have a look at what hardware (e.g. PSU or dedicated GPU if one was used) was present). I'm also very surprised by those Idle values. You usually only get such high numbers when actually having a dedicated GPU in your system (but maybe they did do so - I don't know but I would have guessed you'd have taken a value with just Onboard-graphics or something when posting the values you gave us)...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Those numbers represent usage of said processors in an average configuration. Nothing crazy and certainly not a PC with only onboard graphics cards, as that wasn't what this discussion was about. Those idle values are pretty high indeed, which is why I had my doubts whether a 450Watt power supply would be enough in more demanding cases. That's all I ever argued.

I'll look for the article, but it was on a Dutch website. I'll post it if I can find it.



You're taking what I've said out of context here though. You brought up the thing about recommending even more power with SLI or Crossfire systems. Also implying you would still be able to run a SLI or Crossfire machine with only 500Watt. I disagreed with that.



It was hardly a prediction as my machine simply did not boot. It wasn't able to run. In other words, said configuration needs a more than 450Watt psu.

Twist it all you want, but even though your Phenom definitely is a bit less power hungry, even your power supply has to really work hard to keep up in order to keep your system running stable. Again.. one of my points here.

I'm not sure but maybe you misread something. I brought up the 750+ watts point because that's pretty much a quote of what you said - let me get it straight for you:


That's when I said that besides the "750 Watt minimum spec" is too high you totally overdid the recommendation towards ventilator (which would be the 500-750 watts). I don't see any misleading comment telling that something around 400 watts would be able to run even a triple (!) SLI / CF system as you tell me I told...


*Sigh*

You know that's why I was telling you about that it's a bit frustrating that you simply seem not to read the posts here at all or just use your personal "censorship-filter" to sort out everything you don't like. I'll probably make it more clear later on but things go like this: The xxx watt number of a PSU is a pretty important factor but it's not the ONLY decisive one. So with that said yeah - I believe you that your system might not have run with whatever 450 watt PSU you used. That's a totally credible scenario. Your conclusion of "More watt = More success" is wrong though. I think I kept telling long enough about the 12v rails and their importance making them a decider if a system will run or not rather independet from the watt number (and even then there are some little tricks like how to wire a PCIe power adapter if you need more than your PSU delivers which may not work with certain ways of wiring it). So no - you can't just go ahead and choose any PSU just from the number of watts it's advertised with...

To give you an allegory: It's like you would say that in order to get a fast CPU you have to get one with a high clock. That would have some truth to it as more clock means more speed. If you just go ahead though and make the clock the only decisive factor for a CPU you'll end up wrong with your predictions as you'll end up recommending a nice Pentium 4 with 3+ GHz over a Quad Core with let's say just 2GHz...


I don't understand this part of yours: I was using my CPU to compare it to yours power consumption wise. You don't really want to tell me the Phenom consumes less than your Core 2 Duo?

As a final statement on everything and to sum things up I'll make a general comment about all of this:

The watt number is a pretty important stat for a PSU while not being the only one with big importance. You also should pay attention to the number of 12V rails and how much they are able to deliver (because otherwise the PSU might not be able to deliver the desired power). You'll rather often hear the "You need lots of watt for a powerful system"-myth because PSUs with more watt pretty much naturally get more power on those rails suddenly making things work again. So for a single GPU system you should get something with at least two 12V rails delivering something around 30A (I don't know the exact minimum as I never saw tests lately testing this out - 30 A should be a pretty nice number though). You also should be fine with anything around 400 watts as long as you don't overdo it by e.g. using lots and lots of HDDs - any energy consumption calculator can help you with that though. If you want to have some more powerful graphic cards forming up a Multi-GPU system you should go up to something between 500-600 watts and make sure your PSU has three or four 12V rails (nowadays 3 rails are slowly becoming more common for PSUs with even around 400 watts)...

There also is something that Phemox came up here in a sidenote which is not true (in general). The watt value a PSU is advertised with should be the value that the PSU is able to pump into the system. So you don't have to subtract any inefficency from it (although you always should keep quite some distance to your PSU's max values). The inefficency is something the PSU will drain additionally to what it delivers to the system. In other words a PSU can drain more power - e.g. let's say you have a PSU which is advertised with 400W and let's say it has a 50% efficency. When now having a system that magically drains exactly those 400W and runs stable with that the PSU would consume 600 watts - that's totally possible although you really should avoid any case near that...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Don't forget that the newer generation of CPUs tend to be less power hungry. From Pentium 4 and Pentium D (about 95Watts) to Core 2 Duo (65Watts) is a long way, add the fact that AMD tends to make pretty much the most power efficient CPUs and comparing a new generation with an older generation CPU of not even the same kind is a bit off.

I'm still saying your power supply has only barely enough power to keep your system running at full load though.



Apparently you've literally stopped reading (;)) after the 500-750 watts part though, as I was commenting with more in mind than just the system Ventilator already had planned to go for. Which is actually pretty obvious.
It's ripping a post out of it's context in my book when you totally disregard the rest of what was posted.

Anyways, lets stop this debate and not turn it into a 'I said.. then you said.. then I replied' thread, as that's pointless anyway.



Oh come on, don't give me that crap. We've been here before when it comes to this subject. I don't know about you, but I didn't feel like going into great detail again. Apart from the fact that when I talked about a specific system as an example of how a power supply under 500watt can be very much insufficient regardless of efficiency, you came with claims of how an entirely different system could do with less.

Lots of apples and oranges like last time and the example was merely meant to justify buying gear with the 'safe zone' in mind, possibly even leaving room to upgrade to a more powerful machine.

Meaning you will hardly build a system that will fail with 500+Watt PSUs, which really was my point of the 500-750Watt power supply range I was recommending anyways. Added bonus is the improved overall stability. But I've said all this before......

Well I guess you didn't really follow the CPU market that tight because your statement pretty much excludes the entire bad situation AMD had...

At first: Of course does my CPU consume much more energy than yours simply because it is a quad core and yours is a dual core. It won't be twice as much but definitely a big bunch more (it doesn't get a 125 TDP rating for no reason). The next statement about power efficency & AMD in combination with my Phenom is unfortunately very wrong. AMD had so much problems to put up anything nearly as good as Intel's Core 2 generation. The Phenom itself then was a rather bad CPU that probably suffered the most from the sucky 65nm SOI process it was made with which also performed very bad for the 65nm Athlon X2 downshrinks (which just got a slightly lowered power consumption but needed more clock to be as fast as the 90nm versions - one reason why you could buy the 6000+ Windsor for quite a long time although the Brisbane 65nm version was out too). The only way AMD could do any good against the Core 2 Quads was to rival via the price as performance & power consumption was quite bad in comparison to the Core 2's. As I can make good use of four cores now and then I was happy to pick up a quad core for quite a cheap price when I set up my new PC...


Well I went back and read it again and still saw nothing of relevance except for something I decided not to comment on. You did your statement responding to my comment towards ventilator that he doesn't need 500 watts for his system as even way more powerful systems than his (e.g. mine) won't need that much. You then started talking of your quite power consuming system and what PSU you needed and so on and gave him the 500-750 watt recommendation even though he had measured the consumption of his system with <250 watts (including the inefficency) which is what all my critic (despite the general question of how much a powerful system needs) was about...

You then only did a remark about "improved stability". Well that's the point I decided not to comment about as imo that's a quite flawed term as this kinda is a "boolean" and not a "gradient". It's either "stable" or it's not and "rarely crashing" already is unstable to my mind. So there's no room for an "improved stability" or does this mean your system still crashes from time to time (with the PSU being responsible for it) and you'd consider buying a stronger PSU to get you an "improved stability"?


Yeah - I came up with a different system but the power consumption was very comparable, i.e. due to the CPU mine should drain a bit more than yours...

And when talking about what you called "crap" - with that I e.g. meant that you didn't for a single time yet (maybe even in the old topic but I'm not sure of that anymore) even use the word "12V rail" in any of your posts. It's a quite important spec for a PSU, would explain why you had to buy a new PSU although having one without enough watt but still you keep treating this silent...

That's why I told you what I did because we're discussing something here but when I give you an argument that would prove your statement wrong and explain as to why you were wrong you just appear to ignore it not mentioning it with a single line...

Enjoy your meal
Toast