Originally posted by: Ken90630
Originally posted by: bob4432
no offense taken
i base my recommendations on my personal and friends upgrade pattern, which is usually something majory every 9-18mos (in my case cpu went from a 75Mhz -> 450MHz -> 750MHz -> 1GHz -> xp2000 -> 2.8C P4 -> Opty 144 -> X2 3800, and gpu went - voodoo 3000 -> ti4200 -> 9800pro -> x800xtpe -> x1800xt), for me the next step will be moving to ddr2 and whatever cpu brand is better at the time. so i know my stuff gets update pretty often and i have in the past purchased psu that were more in line with what i needed at the time only to buy another one 9mos later. soon i had bunch of psus lying around and i was handing them out to friends as i no longer had a use for them, but if i would have bought a larger 1 farther back, i would have saved myself hundreds of $$$ throughout the course, not thinking i would upgrade as much as i did.
Hi, Bob,
I understand your line of thinking here completely. What I would assert, however (and again, no offense ), is that maybe you
thought you needed to upgrade some of those earlier PSUs when maybe you didn't. Realistically, if your previous PSUs were high quality 300-watters or greater,
and had enough amps on the 12V rail, you could have continued to use them with your upgraded CPUs and vid cards with no problems. As recently as 2-3 years ago, it was pretty difficult to even
build a PC that would draw much over 200 watts. I had a phone discussion with one of the engineers at PC Power & Cooling about this when I was building my first rig, and didn't really understand power requirements, and that's what he explained to me. According to him, the reason they and other companies were making 300-watt PSUs and higher (I asked ) was for the proverbial "breathing room for future expansion." This was around the time the P4s had come out and CPU power requirements were on the rise and we didn't know how those requirements were gonna continue to evolve.
The point I'm trying to make is that even the high quality 400-watt PSUs of today have
plenty of "breathing room" for expansion already, since the draw from even high-end, cutting edge single-card system is typically not going to be above even 300 watts (if that). Obviously, it's possible to build a machine with dual vid cards, the fastest chip available, and a whole slew of drives and cathode lights and 8 fans or something that might push peak power demand a bit higher, but how many people are gonna do that?
I guess it boils down to
how much "breathing room for future expansion" is enough? 100 watts? 200 watts? 300? :Q Unless there's some unforseen new technology in CPUs and vid cards that will skyrocket power requirements in the very near future, just about anyone on this site could run their rig on, say, a Seasonic S12-430 or even -380 and still have
gobs of breathing room for future expansion. Now, if you need extra connectors or something that are typically only found on higher-powered units, that's different. But buy that higher-powered unit for
that reason -- not because you believe you truly need the extra power.
In the end, many people are gonna do what they're gonna do regardless of facts. The myth of the need for ulta-high-powered PSUs is
so deeply imbedded in so many people's heads that it's hard to get them to change their thinking.
What really matters is the amperage available on the 12 rail(s), and the overall quality of the PSU, not total wattage. But whatever .... it's their money and if they wanna throw it away, that's their business. Awhile back (~ a year or two ago?) there was another thread on this subject in which I issued a challenge for someone -- anyone -- to post a profile of system they could build that would draw more than 300 watts (or something like that -- I forget the exact number I used) in real world conditions. The challenge included posting the wattage calculation they would use to arrive at their conclusion. Not one person accepted the challenge.
I'd also venture that many people reading this post (or the article over at SPCR.com) might even realize that they don't really need a higher-powered PSU. But they'll buy one anyway because they don't really understand power requirements and they think they'll be "playing it safe" by having extra power "just in case." So again, whatever .... :laugh: