{"id":3075,"date":"2011-10-16T21:04:01","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T10:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/?p=3075"},"modified":"2011-10-16T21:04:01","modified_gmt":"2011-10-16T10:04:01","slug":"check-a-power-supply-units-efficiency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/check-a-power-supply-units-efficiency\/","title":{"rendered":"Check a Power Supply Unit&#8217;s Efficiency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a tip for people looking to build a new computer or upgrade their existing one.<\/p>\n<p>Most things inside the computer will require power measured in &#8220;watts&#8221;. To put it simply, this measures the rate at which electricity moves through a circuit. One watt (1W) is equal to one joule of energy consumed in one second. As the number of joules consumed per second increases so does the measured wattage.<\/p>\n<p>So what are the notable mentions that consume energy inside a computer?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Video cards (anywhere up to 400W each for high end cards),<\/li>\n<li>CPUs (modern CPUs such as the i7 top out around 130W),<\/li>\n<li>Hard drives (up to 30W on start up and 10 &#8211; 20W when in operation),<\/li>\n<li>Optical drives (up to 10W).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>Most components will list their maximum power draw in watts which will help you determine the size of your required power supply (if you are buying a new one) or if your current power supply will cope with new components. Just add up all of the wattages to work out the power consumption under full load.<\/div>\n<div>Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that getting a power supply unit that comes in just above the maximum power draw will do the trick but you should bear in mind that PSUs are not 100% efficient. In particular, cheap or generic units may only be around 60% efficient. This means that a 600W PSU with 60% efficiency could only deliver 360W (600W * 0.6 = 360W). More expensive or brand name units can be 80% or 90% efficient. These days, the efficiency is marked on the box and the PSU so you shouldn&#8217;t have too many issues working out how much headroom you have to adequately power the computer.<\/div>\n<div>Certainly, it&#8217;s not advisable to cut it fine as you may end up some weird side effects such as video glitches, crashes or data corruption if there isn&#8217;t enough power to go around. You could also check to see if you can upgrade existing components with more power efficient ones that offer the same or increased performance.<\/div>\n<div>So don&#8217;t skimp on a PSU as it forms the basis of a reliable computing experience.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a tip for people looking to build a new computer or upgrade their existing one. Most things inside the computer will require power measured in &#8220;watts&#8221;. To put it simply, this measures the rate at which electricity moves through a circuit. One watt (1W) is equal to one joule of energy consumed in one &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link btn\" href=\"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/check-a-power-supply-units-efficiency\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[333,93,336,335,94,138,332,92,18],"tags":[1715,212,311,2274,1714,186,1311],"class_list":["post-3075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cpu-processors-technology","category-hard-drive","category-i7","category-intel","category-optical","category-power","category-processors","category-storage","category-technology","tag-efficiency","tag-electricity","tag-gpu","tag-power","tag-psu","tag-video-card","tag-watt","item-wrap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}