Tetrium wrote:I used to know the power requirements of my rigs and the rigs of a friend of mine from top of my head (we both measure power consumption at the wall).
Obviously PSU efficiency mattered a lot when taking these measurements.
This is something some folks may want to bear in mind. With a good power supply of at least 80% efficiency or above.. I forget the exact calculations but roughly you consider something like +20% AC side. Which means like my 3770k computer pulling 600 watts when gaming, that's the AC side and it's actually doing something like 450-500 DC side inside the computer. I don't have the little dongle to connect to my corsair unit in mine to read it with the software but that's pretty much how it works.
I was using a seasonic platinum unit in my 3770k, but it decided to go wishy-washy when I loaded it one day.. literally wouldn't switch my computer on, no earthly idea why. Swapped it out for a Corsair RM750 Gold that a friend of mine gave me on trade instead and been fine every since... and my seasonic platinum seems to work fine for other "test systems" in the house.. no idea why either. Power supplies are weird.
A while back before, my gaming rig I had for 2 and a half years was a 1200-watt-at-the-wall beast. It consisted of a pair of water cooled GTX-470's (with huge overclocks about +35% core & +44% ram), which were the main culprits.. almost 400 watts each. And then I had 8 x 15,500 rpm scsi SAS hard drives in it too, and an i7-980x CPU @ 4.6 ghz @ 1.55v water cooled.
So it may seem like my 3770k system uses "a lot of power" @ 650 watts gaming.. but compared to what I had before this system now overall is roughly +3x to +3.5x faster in performance in every aspect vs my x58 system, and uses about -600 watts less power. Main savings came from switching to a pair of samsung Pro 850 series SSD's in raid-0 that replaced the whole sas array I used to run. +3x faster and tons less power.