Why in 2007 I was told to buy a 700w PSU ?

[tweakboy]

I clearly remember in late nov 2007 ,,, PSUs were expensive and the most expensive part next to cpu and video card.

Its good to have a quality PSU of course with stable rails.

My question is reading on here and other places, everyone would say If your getting a Core 2 Quad and a 8800 GT you need at least 600watts and 700w to be safe ?

This is not true, cuz I see people with 500w PSUs and modern day stuff. We know video card is still a beast in taking wattage, and CPU and other stuff. Today I see people with Ivy Bridge 8 thread CPUs with 450w psu and a 670 video card ,,,,,,, hmmmmm. Thanks GB

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It depends.

 

[Subyman]

I do not understand the premise, you are pretty much saying that newer hardware should take more power than older hardware?

You need to look at the power requirements for each device in your computer and come up with a safe PSU rating. Generations of hardware has nothing to do with it.

Q6600 is 105W TDP, 8800GT is 105W TDP. You do not need a forum to tell you what wattage you need for that. 450-500W would have been fine.

 

[Vicaar]

I was confused by this as well. There are a couple of factors - some of the newer hardware is more efficient (so long as you aren't going for an AMD CPU or nVidia gfx cards).

It also seems to be difference with the switch from dual-12v rails backs to a single rail. I remember back with my last upgrade, it was a challenge to find a PSU with the right numbers across both rails. Now, it is simply a matter of finding one that pushes out enough on a single rail. So a dual-rail 600w a few years ago might have been a mere 28A on each rail (I'm making up numbers), which would be useless now. But now single-rail PSUs seem to have upwards of 45A on a single rail, but still rate at 600w. So contrary to what you might think, we haven't gone from needing 600w+ to 1000w+...

 

[Brutus04]

Are you looking for someone to blame?

 

[imagoon]

It also doesn't help that there are plenty of "1100watt" computer PSU's that can't even deliver 500watts with out shutting down.

If you buy a quality unit you can often get by with what seems like "1/2 the wattage" etc because the quality 400watt can deliver 350+ watts cleanly without issue while that $10 1000watter is shutting down due to 'overload.'

 

[njdevilsfan87]

No idea what you're talking about. I had an overclocked Q6600 with a Q92 880GTS and the recommended PSU at the same was a Corsair 520HX, which worked perfectly for that setup. That was recommended for a powerful single card setup, where as a 620HX was recommended for SLI.

Edit : Though I do believe that's around when "multiple 12V rail PSUs" started to become hyped, and there were a lot of crappy high wattage PSUs from what I remember. Maybe that's why?

 

[Sheep221]

I rocked 125W CPU and 105W Video card, 2 HDDs, under constant load, my PSU was 420W, never had any problem. Unless you plan to overclock and game hardcore with mutli GPU setup, you should be fine with max 500W

 

[tcsenter]

Told by whom?

 

[Eureka]

We have better power supplies now, and leaner chips. Then again, I was running a 955BE/4890 rig off a 500W PSU in 2009..