X800XL uses 239W but my psu is 240W?

[w00t]

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/radeon-x800xl/power.gif

just wondering how the rest of my system runs on 1 watt

 

[Doomguy]

That's total power consumption of the whole PC! Read the top

 

[jiffylube1024]

Yeah that is system power consumption dude! We aren't at THAT stage yet (although dual core P4's consume something like 130W+).

 

[w00t]

lol, time to kill myself jk

 

[Pete]

Xbitlabs posts just the video card power draw. Their latest review (of the 6800GS) showed the XL drawing something like 50W. That's the PCIe version, anyway.

 

[Chesebert]

You might want to divide the total system power by 0.75 to arrive at your recommanded PSU rating as no PSU can work at 100% efficiency.

 

[videoclone]

MicroATX Power supplies come allot closer to 100% then Full ATX ones... Am i right?
i remember reading this somewhere!

 

[gtx4u]

hooray my 6800 gt SLI oc @ ultra eats away at 360 watts no wonder I'm poor :-D

 

[aatf510]

My SLI 7800GTs system drains 311w max from the wall (therefore, entire system probably using 75% - 80% of 311w) no matter what I throw at it.
So, I am guessing 240w is pretty suffcient for a single video card system.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: videoclone
MicroATX Power supplies come allot closer to 100% then Full ATX ones... Am i right?
i remember reading this somewhere!

Not really. If anything, forcing them to be smaller will probably hurt efficiency. Although some of them have very good rail amperage ratings for their overall wattage rating.

A crappy PSU will be about 60-65% efficient, a decent one will be 65-75%, and a really good one will be in the 75-85% range.

 

[aLeoN]

How would you find out how many W each component uses? Just estimates?

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: aLeoN
How would you find out how many W each component uses? Just estimates?

Stick a multimeter on each voltage component of the part (eg: on the molex supply for a gfx card and on the power pins of the PCIe connector).

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: aLeoN
How would you find out how many W each component uses? Just estimates?

Stick a multimeter on each voltage component of the part (eg: on the molex supply for a gfx card and on the power pins of the PCIe connector).

That won't tell you anything about how much wattage/power it uses. You have to measure current in series with a device, not in parallel.

XBitLabs/digit-life has done some testing with a custom ammeter placed on the PSU lines. Silent PC Review has some numbers for full systems, but not individual parts. A few places have done comparative testing, giving full system power usage numbers with multiple video cards, so you can see how much more power one uses than another.

As a rough guide, a very high-end video card might use up to 125W (with most in the 50-100W range), and a CPU (except for very high-end Intel P4EE models) is between 50 and 100W. Most of the draw from those is on the +12V rail. Hard drives are somewhere around 10-20W each; optical drives are similar. Your motherboard/RAM and all the onboard stuff is probably in the ~50W range, spread across +3.3V, +5V, and +12V.

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: aLeoN
How would you find out how many W each component uses? Just estimates?

I bought a Kill-A-Watt and it measures the w coming out from the outlet.