probably ~100W with monitor

Hmm...
I wonder how many watts my PSU puts out. I cannot find any indicator as to how much wattage it has. It's a S2 API 8138 PSU.

I wouldnt worry about it

I'm sure you didn't find out how much watts that thing outputs though?

its right there in the picture 😀 ~100W

I see the rails, but I do not see the approximate wattage number. Did you just convert the amps on the rails to watts and add the watts or did you look on the PSU label and find 100W? If you found 100w on the psu label please take a picture of it's location.

I see the rails, but I do not see the approximate wattage number. Did you just convert the amps on the rails to watts and add the watts or did you look on the PSU label and find 100W? If you found 100w on the psu label please take a picture of it's location.

Well, I just measured my 286. I give that it's not yours so the result won't be the same but it still says something. It idles at ~29W and consumes up to 37.5W while spinning up the hard drive. The config is as follows:

Octek Fox II 286 board (very small, heavily integrated Headland chipset) with a Harris 20MHz CPU
4MiB SIMM RAM
Cirrus Logic GD-5402 512kB VGA
Gravis Ultrasound Classic 3.74 (I know it's crazy but there are a few games and demos that can use it in a 286 😁)
ES688 for real OPL3 music and SB compatibility (yes, it has the Yamaha chip)
Standard ISA I/O card (probably Winbond based)
1.2M+1.44M FDD
840MB Quantum HDD
HP PS/2 keyboard

The power supply is a rather modern (for an AT PSU) 200-watt DTK piece. The other parts are relatively recent too and probably consume less power than old bulky hardware with a hundred logic chips on the mobo and the cards and an oldschool hot 286 (the 20MHz Harris CPU is definitely much cooler than, say, a 10MHz Intel one) yet I wouldn't think a more oldschool 286 could draw more than ~1.5x of this config. The only way to seriously outdo it would be a huge MFM hard drive. What does that sideboard do btw?

On a side note, the original IBM PC power supply was rated for 63 Watts and AFAIK it could cause problems with a combo of expansion boards and MFM drives.

Old PC Hunter wrote:

I see the rails, but I do not see the approximate wattage number. Did you just convert the amps on the rails to watts and add the watts

yep, its a period correct supply from 286 system, "I wouldnt worry about it"

Sorry I sent so many messages, Vogons wasn't letting me post anything, but thanks for all the info. Also, alvaro84, your 286 seems like a very good system. 😀 I think I will use your build as inspiration for what i'm going to do with my 286. The sIDE Board is an IDE hard disk controller and i/o controller, but the board already has these functionalites, so i'll be removing it soon.