Gadgetory

we're revisiting an old topic a few years ago we posted an article entitled how many watts does a gaming PC really need which focused on testing multiple configurations for power consumption we started working on a revisit to this last week he was seen the new cooler master master watt bronze at 450 watt PSU as a baseline seen as recently and in general we vadoma kated for more 400 to 450 watt power supplies and build this content piece shows how far we can get on the lower wattage power supplies with modern hardware before getting to that list coverage is brought to you by the EVGA 1080 TI sc2 and NVIDIA destiny to bundle running up through September 4th the 1080i sc2 comes with a synchronous fan control for its dual fans and nine thermal sensors and again includes destiny to learn more at the link in the description below this is kind of an old topic we've looked at it probably a couple times over the years because as Hardware iterates attempts to get more power efficient generally speaking so it's always worth going back to and there was a period where 1,000 plus watt power supplies were pretty common for gaming systems outside of the mining craze where it actually kind of makes sense but now with where modern hardware is 400 450 Watts will really get you quite far for something like a 1080 10 70s stuff like that most people we see online pick stuff that's 600 800 watts somewhere in that range even that's a little overkill 600 is ok but once you start getting 700 plus it's it's not needed for really a lot of the hardware that's out there right you could do an i7 or an r7 or an hour 5 build with a 1080 or a 1080i and get away just fine at 600 watts and even lower if you really wanted to which we'll show today so we're using the cooler master master while PSU which we're just using because brand-new and it's 450 watts and it's supposed to be I think $50 which is where we want to see them and with the lower wattage power supplies hopefully becoming more prevalent it's there's give me more questions on line of weight can I actually use 450 watts and get away with PC so that's what we're gonna look at today a couple of reasons you would want a high-end PSU which is different from just a high wattage power supply they're not they're not the same thing obviously so high-end power supplies will get you things like better voltage ripple which has potentially a significant impact on clock stability if you have a power spot with a whole lot of voltage ripple cause it's garbage then you're gonna end up with problems with the clock dropping like if you have say 80 to 100 millivolts the voltage ripple versus ten that'll be noticeable especially with overclocking other reasons for high end power supplies are all the different protections over current over power over voltage stuff like that are built into the thing to try and prevent either you or an external force from inadvertently destroying the power supplier that components that hide behind it so a lot of reasons for a high end unit but a high end unit doesn't have to be high wattage it can be a lower wattage unit too so that's what we're looking at today the point of this is mostly to illustrate how overkill people go because really you don't need 800 plus watts for a lot of the stuff that's out there let's start with idle power consumption this is expectedly low across the board and not really that exciting you're well below a hundred watts and pretty much all scenarios so we can move on from this one quickly and just go straight into gaming so look at GTA 5 we tested games in 1080p and 1440p and are only showing average draw for these applications not the peak draw but the average during the gaming scenario with the msi gtx 1060 used which is the lowest power consumer of the GPUs we have on this charge and with these 1600 x combined with it we rest at just under 200 watts on average for GTA 5 EVGA is 1070 SC and 1600 x combo comes up next running a power consumption of 220 to 240 watts with peak consumption at 246 this puts us around or a little over 50% of the power supply's total continuous capabilities meaning we're roughly at the peak of the efficiency curve for the 230 volt outlets and europe and elsewhere in the world for the master watt bronze 450 watt unit for the u.s. outlets at 115 volts peak efficiency is closer to the 45 percent area pushing beyond that 50 percent marker the 1080 FTW and 1600 x configuration consumes about 230 to 270 watts and the 1080 plus 70 700 K a stock config draws 270 to 280 to the latter positions us at around 62% utilization which is really plenty acceptable switching to an Rx 580 moves us up between the 280 and 300 watt range or both configurations around where the 4.9 gigahertz overclocked 7700 K antenna 80 land at 300 Watts draw we're using 67% of the power supplies available continuous supply and at 230 volts we're still plenty efficient at this point just above 85% with 115 volt efficiency dropping to around 85% or just below at this point efficiency is less of a concern that noise might be well as power supplies will begin ramping fan curve at this mark so noise levels rise that increase may not be noticeable over the rest of the systems of noise under similar load granted but it's something worth pointing out and just a quick side note here the efficiency curve chart and noise curve chart that we have are from cooler masters marketing materials so we're working with their scales here total war is next and it gives us another look at different types of game performs for CPU load is higher with performance ranging from 206 watts consumption to 336 Watts average power consumption at the wall across all the configurations 336 wasps were breaching 74 percent utilization out of the 450 available which increases us along the fan curve acts as significantly now at around 7 to 8 DB a higher than the 60% mark and we validated this with our own DB meter that's not a concern the power supply can still handle it especially considering that most gamers aren't putting their systems under constant high utilization scenario is non-stop this is sustained for gaming it's still fine it's just not ideal we're also losing a head room here for the spike your load levels which peaked at 3 54 watts with a 1080 and 7700 KOC system and losing room for additional components or GPU overclocking realistically you really shouldn't pair a 450 watt power supply with a GTX 1080 and overclock study 700 K anyway because you're spending that kind of money on those components you probably have enough money to buy a higher wattage power supply and although you don't need it's worth getting with those high-end components just to have the overhead for GPU overclocking that's not of interest and you've got some room but still at some point you draw the line and when you're spending that much money it is worth considering a slightly higher wattage power supply just to give yourself room because you can move these power supplies from one system to the next as you iterate and build but either way that doesn't mean you couldn't use the lower wattage ones like the 450 watt unit we have here here's rocket League where we see lower power consumption due to the lighter weight workload at the very high end we're drawing 284 watts give or take keeping us reasonably close to peak efficiency on the curve and lower noise levels this games not that stressful though speaking of not that stressful in terms of power consumption we can look at the production and synthetic workloads that are more CPU driven we're clearly well below the 50% mark here as the GPU remains unutilized and other resources don't engage as heavily we're well under 200 watts and most of these tests so clearly for a lot of gaming builds you'd be fine with 450 watts you'd be fine with 400 watts if you can find one the problem is towards the lower wattage end of the scale there's a whole lot more garbage components a lot a lot more cheap stuff that may be 80 plus white if you're lucky for efficiency ratings but otherwise kind of gets untrustworthy in that area so it's harder to find power supplies in the 400 watt range that are actually good value for the money without also getting into the dangerous component assembly area but 450 watts is starting to fill out now cooler masters got this Silverstone's been pushing for 400 450 watts for a while now and they have good product in that category EVGA is starting to work on it Corsair starting to get more of those out there so it's becoming more popular for 50 especially and clearly it's enough power for a lot of configurations the ones we built here aren't meant to be like the best PC you get build just meant to be here's a look at a couple of popular components thrown together and what kind of power they consume arguments for higher wattage you can go with would be well maybe you want to transplant the power supply into future systems and maybe a train you're trying to do more with it or planning to do something like multi-gpu or memory or CPU overclock and GPU overclocking things like that there's argument there for higher wattage power supplies but for a lot of builds really get away with this or with stuff even in the 400 watt range especially when you're looking at the lower end GPUs that are lower power consumption so that's all we wanted to point out is that you really don't need these 800 watt power supplies everyone wants to use now with Vega 56 and 64 when you start doing stuff like we're doing and stay tuned for this content and pushing the power target by a hundred plus percent then you probably want it we were drawing a hundred plus well it might have been 150 watts more in some cases than stock so there are reasons to go with higher wattage but most people don't ever get into that territory so that's all for this one as always you can help us out directly on patreon.com slash gamers Nexus gamers Nexus squarespace.com to pick up a shirt like this one and a side note will be at PAX West this weekend I suppose so if you see us there give us a shout otherwise stay tuned for the coverage subscribe for all that and we'll see you all next time you