How Much Power Am I Using?

[adnank77]

Hi ..

I'm having Core i7 930 @ 3.5 Ghz, mATX Board, 24 GB RAM, 2x 7970s in xFire, 1x SSD, 1x HDD, 1x Optical, 1x Card Reader, few USBs

PSU is Alienware's 875W

How do I know how much am I using ? If I plan to upgrade to RAID and add more drives, will it take it ?

 

[Lonyo]

Best way to check is to get a watt meter.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=kill-a-watt
Something like that if you can find it in your country.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/588

This indicates around 700w from the wall (so more like 600w actual after PSU efficiency is accounted for), so you should have headroom, plus most HDD power draw is on startup, when your GPUs shouldn't be drawing too much power.

Or you could consider something like a NAS box which might be better generally if you want RAID for some level of backup.

 

[lehtv]

Hi ..

I'm having Core i7 930 @ 3.5 Ghz, mATX Board, 24 GB RAM, 2x 7970s in xFire, 1x SSD, 1x HDD, 1x Optical, 1x Card Reader, few USBs

Estimate:

i7-930 @ 3.5 = 160W (130W TDP at 2.8 * 3.5/2.8, this may or may not be close to reality)
7970 CF = 2x 190W (no overclock) (techpowerup)
The rest < 100W

= less then 640W peak system load. While gaming, you'll probably be using about 500W on average.

If I plan to upgrade to RAID and add more drives, will it take it ?

Assuming the PSU is good quality, sure it'll take it. I dont have any knowledge how good Alienware (Dell) units are though.

In any case, if a PSU is being pushed so hard that adding more drives would be too much, then you're already pushing it too hard. You should always have more than enough of a safety margin that adding a few drives wouldn't make any difference.

 

[who?]

The monitoring software with my APC ups tells me how much power my system is using.

 

[Red Squirrel]

If I had to take a really wild guess I'd say about 300-400w. That's what my PC uses with a core i7 and 2x video cards (GTX 560 in my case). You can always get a watt/amp meter to check though. Keep in mind that what is being pulled from the wall is a little bit more than what is being pulled from the PSU, but it gives you a general idea, and a real life figure of how much power your PC uses. If your meter is not true RMS the reading is also not that accurate.