Will PCs hit the max on normal home circuit?

[Red Squirrel]

PSUs don't "use power" in of themselves expect to run the fan. Power use is completely dependent on how much the components are drawing.

Also, you use a crappier proxy variable(heatsink size, LOL) to approximate power use over TDP. Every Watt eventually does get converted into heat, and the cooling products MUST be able to dissipate however many rated watts on average. The fact is that CPUs rarely go over 140Ws at stock is a sign that CPUs have been "stuck in netural" heat generation-wise since the Pentium 4 era and that is only going down now.

Well heat sink is a half decent indication as the bigger the heat sink, the more heat the component it was designed for generates. Of course nothing stops you from putting today's heat sinks on a 486.

I recently upgraded from an Athlon X2 to a Core i7 and two GTX 560's, and I could not believe the size of that heat sink. And not to mention the size of the video card heat sink and fan. My last video card did not even have a fan on it. This new PC draws a couple hundred watts more than my last one did, and it heats the room quite well even in winter. Even removed one video card. (long story)

That said, unless you are pushing the PC at 100% and have like 4 GPUs and one very powerful cpu or multiple powerful cpus, the odds of hitting 15 amps at the wall is quite slim.

My entire server setup at home uses around 350w. Though it's older stuff. Core2quad for the main server, Pentium 3 for the firewall, Atom for environmental control server, and then DSL modem and a Dell 24 port gigabit switch. My core i7 machine uses about that on it's own lol. Almost makes me want to NOT upgrade my stuff.