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 a couple 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 higher, but how many people are gonna do that? For hardcore gamers running SLI, quad core, and O/Cing the heck out of both, sure -- go for gobs of power. But for most "mainstream" users, even average gamers, that power is prolly gonna go unused.
EDIT: happy medium's link to AtomicMPC's site, showing the ravenous power requirements of some of the new and upcoming cards, has shown me that my original paragraph here was off the mark. My humblest apologies.
In the end, what really matters in a PSU is the amperage available on the 12 rail(s), and the overall
quality of the PSU, not total wattage[/i]. 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. That challenge could be answered successfully today with a quad-core, SLI, overclocked system, but it would take a system like that to do it. Per Icepick's link earlier in this thread, Anandtech's own review shows the highest-end single vid carded system only drawing 301 watts.
I'd 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." To each his own, but I think a lot of people, particularly all but the most hardcore gamers, are just wasting their money on 500- and 600-watt PSUs. IMHO, of course.
EDITED for corrections and some re-wording.