[TriEclipse]

I love how perfect the timing of this was.

L'inq - Ultimate Overclocked PC only needs 500W Power Supply.

Originally Posted by The Inquirer
Yes, after over 2 days of running heavy stuff in this overloaded (700W++ class!) system config, the 500W MGE power supply is still alive and well. I spent quite a bit of time monitoring its LCD display power spike reports, and the highest one was 429 Watts, consumed during the full 3DMark06 run (Proxyon landing at UXGA 4xAA anisotropic filtering). I managed to take a quick blurred shot of one 423 Watt screen for your viewing pleasure. In the 'typical' use (i.e. running the Ntune utility and opening up a PDF file) it was at about 315 W, and it went up to nearly 330 W when running Sandra benchmarks.

Of course, the argument still stands that there should be a reserve, for unexpected power usage spikes - and I agree. The only thing is, I believe that the heaviest runs of multithreaded, hi-res 3DMark06 are a kind of power usage spike, naturally - they stress pretty much everything, from the CPU cores, their caches, FSB, memory, PCI-E, also 25% overclocked via auto LinkBoost, graphics cards, the power-consuming water cooler, HDD, just not touching the DVD. Yes, a 600 W PSU would give me a more peaceful sleep here, but it is obviously not a necessity. The Ultimate PC config of today, plus or minus few trinkets can be, even in heavy use, reliably fed by a top-class 500W PSU, at least for 2 days non stop.

Yeah, she only ran it for 2 days on that setup, but I wanted to mainly focus on how much power the system consumed; 429W for more hardware than I wish to list again. I'd prefer more of a 600W quality PSU to run it, 429W is still too close to 500W for my tastes. Its certainly feasible, using a 500W PSU, but the quality of your PSU would deteriorate quicker over time.