It all depends on what kind of equipment you have. I overclock my processor and have a power hungry GPU, so I run 650w. And that is a real 650w, as in the minimum power it will produce at max load in 45 degree Celsius heat. The parts are always less than that temperature so even under max load it can easily produce its rating and more and the parts will last a long time. If I were to get a second graphics card I would probably upgrade to an 850w PSU just to be safe.
850w here. Will eventually upgrade to a 1000w when I SLI (in the future). If you need to know, NewEgg has a somewhat helpful guide: http://tinyurl.com/24myg8d - Type in your general computer specs for your max. power draw.
Unfortunately that calculator is not accurate, at least on hard drives. I put my system in there and it says I need a 759 watt power supply. I decided to see what was causing the recommendation to be so high and it turns out my 5 hard drives were taking up 39 watts each on the calculator. Hard drives do not take up that much power, maybe 10-15 max. But not 39 watts each. Also one of my hard drives is a SSD which consumes only a few watts of power. Also a DVD-RW drive in that calculator takes up 39 watts! lol Looks like RAM is right though, only a few watts for 4GB is correct. My graphics card's max TDP is 215 watts, however the calculator says it draws 279w. Not really possible since the absolute max power the graphics card can receive is 225 watts with slot power being 75w, and two 6-pin PCI-E plugs giving 75w each. Edit: I guess it is possible to draw close to the 39 watts during initial spin up of the drive, but normally that is not the case. In which case the you should probably calculate the max power draw into what you need for a PSU so you dont overstress the PSU when you turn the computer on, but if you have a good power supply like mine that is rated for 650w but can actually deliver bursts of power closer to 775w then you are still fine.
According to that calculator, my max power draw is 581w , but I barely crack 250 when gaming (including monitor and 5.1 speakers).
Exactly. Its a nice calculator if you don't have any other asset to gauge by. It was simply a reference, and you don't have to use it if you don't think its accurate, which according to some its not. If you find something better then I would love to see a link for one.
Much better: http://www.antec.outervision.com/ My system with 100% load, 100% CPU utilization, and 20% capacitor aging would draw 691 watts, which is much more accurate. and my CPU overclocked to 3.4GHz
I just put in the basics. My CPU (overclocked), RAM, motherboard, and SLI'd 470's (what I'm going towards) and the recommended was 959w, that's without the harddrives, fans, and all that extra jazz on the right side. I put the equivalent into the NewEgg PSU calculator, with the addition of the harddrive and ODD fields and it says my recommended is 891w. Now I went back to Antec's and left my CPU at stock speeds, added my ODD and HDD to the mix and the recommended from Antec's site (same "stats" as NewEggs) was 898w, only 7w difference from NewEgg. Now that's pretty damn close with the same specs in both fields. But I do like Antec's more as there are more variables one can add.
http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine actually the same as Antec, but it's still probably the most shared calculator around that doesn't give ridiculous numbers.
i think mine is a 700 or 750, i dont really know a buddy of mine had it sitting around and my 500 wasnt enough my specs are core2quad q9550 gtx465 5 harddrives (1 raptor 4 standard) 2 120 mm fans 1 80mm fan 2 optical drives (never used)