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remember when they just plugged into the motherboard and didn’t need multiple external power connections?
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Hey, I had ATI 6990… those were the times
HELL YES ATI CLAN REPRESENT!
My 5990 mined me SO much early bitcoin (now if I had just saved any)
the *990 series were BEASTS, literally had to cut out metal in my drive bays just to fit it in.
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The days of powering your computer with a potato are long behind us comrad
Haha one of my earliest PCs didn’t even have a CPU fan!
When I upgraded my PC decades ago, it didn’t even have a heatsink. Just bare ceramic. Fans weren’t really a requirement until the Pentium era, or maybe the late 486 era.
There was some crossover, there were a few Dx4 100s that shipped with small fans and some pentiums were passive cooled even up till the Pentium 2’s.
Some people even scoffed at fans for noise pollution, the arguments were kind of fun to watch at the time.
Can’t speak for the most modern ones which I know are worse, but I was pretty surprised when I recently got a smart plug with power monitoring recently to find that my system with a 3080 (though, undervolted slightly), 16-core cpu, way too many peripherals, eight various drives, several small screens and dual monitors, only pulls 600-650W under full load.
I got the plugs to help me choose an appropriate UPS, and I don’t need one as powerful as I’d thought I would.
I need to get one of those. I have 5 spinning disks + 1 SSD, though not much else high powered - it’s a file server, CPU is at least 8 years old, and GPU (if you can even call it that) is passively cooled… I just replaced my 500W power supply because its fan had died (explains why occasionally I’d come home and find it powered off) and nothing under 650W had enough SATA power connectors, so that’s what I ended up with. Curious how overkill it is…
I run Linux on an old gaming PC that I use as a file server / jellyfin server / homeassistant / probably a bunch more I’m forgetting, and that one rarely goes above 50W, lol. Haven’t tested it under full load, though.
RX 560 runs at 50w and can run old games at 1080p
I hope people are using that power for worthwhile things.
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If you can pull off 250 watts of RGB you can grow plants in your PC case
Unironically heard of folks using PC cases to grow weed stealthily
Mushrooms, don’t forget about computer fungus.
Hyper compact scrog is cute but more trouble than it is worth.
…budgeting? Y’all don’t just buy the meatiest beefcake PSU that microcenter has in stock?
I bought a 1200w PSU in like 2011 and it’s chugging along through multiple upgrades and two different builds. They forgot to put the quit in that one
In 2021 I replaced my old PC power and cooling 750w PSU that I bought in like 2009. When I pulling it out I found a build date from 2006 on it. That thing was a great PSU.
PSUs are waaaaay more efficient when operating closer to their rated capacity. Pulling 200W through a 1kW power supply is like making a marathon runner breathe through a straw.
The sweet spot is the 40-60% load.
But it doesn’t make that much of a difference. The efficiency swing is maybe 10%. Like an bronze 80 rated PSU will have a minimum efficiency of 80%, but even if you’re at the 50% load mark it won’t be over 90% efficient.
The main point (to me anyways) is that its dumb to pay more for a power supply just so you can pay "more* on your power bill. If your idle load is 100W and your gaming load is 300W, you’ve got no reason running more than a 600W PSU
I’ve got a 850W power supply, which I bought 2-3 years ago in anticipation of the RTX 4000 series. My usual load with a GTX 1080 was 150W and now my entire system uses 520W completely loaded. Do I count? :)
While true. How much would it actually save you in electricity? If you upgrade every year wouldn’t it be cheaper to just buy the bigger psu outright and pay the extra cost in electricity so you don’t have to buy another PSU when you get more power hungry components.
Joke if you want but that’s actually a really good idea if you want device longevity. And their in-house brand has been rock solid in every build I’ve made for a reasonable price
Yep. The max wattage on a PSU goes down over time, so you want to overshoot somewhat to keep it useful for longer. Power requirements also typically go up over time with new hardware, but I think that’s been slowing down.
Do you just write things you think people will upvote or do you really believe these things?
That was a problem I actually had when I had no budget, was buying old parts, and then running them way longer than they were intended. I kept everything clean, the tower wasn’t on the carpet, and there were no smokers or pets shedding fur, but that PSU eventually started outputting significantly lower than it was rated for. The previous owner could have done something to it, or it could have been a crappy model to begin with, but it was about fifteen years old and I was told by several more veteran computer folks that PSUs would drop off in power output eventually and this wasn’t surprising.
If you are filling your PSU with tar from cigarette smoking, yes, its max wattage will go down over time.
It’s like making the marathon runner inhale your smoke while running the marathon.
I look at number of connectors… Who cares about wattage, I just need a mass of cables to tuck into every spare bit of space… Fans hate me.
The closest Microcenter to me is about a fourteen hour drive, so, no. Unfortunately, the closest equivalent in the Pacific Northwest went under several years ago and nobody has picked up the slack.
My server/homelab runs on a picopsu.
Wolfgang? Is that you?
?
Reference to Wolfgang’s Channel on YouTube. He’s obsessed with power efficency.
250W in lightning? Does your system need to be installed in a lighthouse and be visible from miles away???
For reference this literal lighthouse light only draws up to 200W: https://www.sealite.com/lighthouse-led-lights/
Mother of Board will you LOOK at the fucking HEAT SINK!?
Clan Ghost Bear is angry we stole their tech
I’d rather go with Clan Wolf tech
Gaming is a naturally social activity, so its only natural to use as a “monitor” a digital projector with enough power for a small cinema room.
Might as well add a laser death ray for good measure
It’s for the bugs in the system.
If your power consumption is actually 250 then go for a 500w PSU. You’ll get better efficiency.
Anandtech (rip) used to be my go-to for PSU efficiency curves.
Also never cheap out on the PSU. If your shit PSU dies, it might fry every component in your PC, if your good PSU dies, you can just replace it.
I once had a PSU fail catastrophically- arcing, visible from around a corner and down a hall, and quite loud. I didn’t want to go near it, circuit breakers were closer anyway, but I didn’t know which one so I just hit them all. Once replaced, I fired up the machine and… I think the cmos was cleared, but other than that, no ill effects.
Better efficiency is only part of it, you’ll also get better longevity on the power supply.
I have a few 1k watt PSUs left over from my bitcoin mining days and all but one of them are still good.
Man, is 20w typical for (maybe a PCIe 5.0) SSD? It would be wild if we ditched moving parts in HDDs and ended up consuming more power
I must be out of touch. What’s RGB in this context?
Ruth Gader Binsburg
Red Green Blue, got to have a ton of RGB lighting in their PC.
The environment: 😢
Does it even go lower?
