I don't think it's unreasonable to go to 700W. I'm running one right now with a Phenom 955 BE, Radeon 5770, 2 HDD, 5 120mm fans, 2 sticks of DDR3 RAM, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive. Now the 4850 can draw up to 250W at peak load and the i5 draws 120W at peak. That's 370 already and we haven't touched the other parts yet. So…
I have a question ::raises hand in girly fashion::..... When new technology is designed and ultimately released, is it safe to say that these companies target their product to meet a certain target in power consumption and find ways to produce a viable product that will increase performance but also not debilitate the…
First off, my math was not completely wrong, just the part on efficiency. And you accuse me of exaggerating. The machine will draw 436W at peak demand. It might not be the norm, but why chance it? It's best to prepare for the worst than to just cut corners. You're taking my point about peak power and applying it as if it's…
Ok, so I got efficiency backwards, so what? It doesn't mean the rest of my math is wrong and it still doesn't mean that 400W is enough. The GPU+CPU+RAM+HDD still comes out to 436W, which is what the system tries to pull from the PSU at power on and under high demand. That doesn't even account for fans/control, DVD, USB…
Seriously run his system through a PSU calculator, you'll get about 320w at 90% load, so 450 is giving over 100w of breathing room, 550 over 200w, 600 is nearly double what he actually needs. You can't simply look at max output for each component and assume this will be the norm or even *ever* happen. Especially because he…