You're probably right! But what happens when you stick cards in every slot and a drive to every SATA/IDE connector?
When you invest upwards of 1500 or maybe more dollars in a computer why cut corners on the power supply? After all it's one of the most important bits in the PC.
I'm not talking about cutting corners. I'm talking about not wasting money on something that you will likely NEVER use when this money could be invested into improving another part of the configuration. The additional €100 spent on a monster PSU could buy something that actually MAKES A FUCKING DIFFERENCE.
When I wrote that the system would likely run with a good 400W PSU, I didn't mean to imply that you should buy nothing bigger than a 400W PSU. The point was that even a
high-end SLI rig with an overclocked CPU doesn't need a 650-1000W monster PSU. Get a good 500-550W PSU and you still have
plenty room for future upgrades and overclocking.
The X-bit numbers that BRit quoted confirm this. 442W peak for a heavily overclocked QUAD CORE system with 2x 10k rpm drives and 8800 GTX SLI.
The average enthusiast PC probably looks more like an upper-end non-XE/XQ C2D with a single GTS or GTX, basically configurations that won't even come close to 400W power draw, more likely much closer to 300W than 400W.
And why buy SLI gfx cards that'll do 150+ fps and then run them off of a LCD that maxes out at 60? (Or indeed cars that'll do 250kph when the law sets the limit at less than half.) Because people want to. So let them. It's their money to spend how they choose.
Telling people "you don't need this. buy something smaller!" is rather arrogant methinks.
Well, I'm not a big friend of SLI either, unless you want to run cutting-edge games in 1920x1200 with high AA.
I'm not trying to tell people how to spend their money, I'm trying to tell hardware reviewers to stop pimping idiotic products like these monster PSUs while keeping their readers in the dark about the true power requirements of a modern PC.
I don't think people WANT to buy 150€ PSUs, I think people are ignorant about the true power requirements of their PCs and they think they NEED it. You have this huge PSU capacity escalation going on and people are just going along with it because hardware testers don't really tell them that their PCs probably only draw 350W or so.
Even most enthusiasts seem to be largely ignorant. Read the forums at various hardware sites, where you have people posting their configurations, that barely even scratch the 350W peak power consumption, with 700W PSUs and shit like that. And the PSU recommendations these people give are every bit as idiotic as the PSUs they buy themselves.
Just read the Futuremark forums... some of the configurations people are posting there are retardedly hilarious, like these:
Code:
gigabyte 965p-dq6
core 2 duo e6600
74 gig 10k raptor
his x1950 512 ddr4
4 gigs gskill ddr 2 @ 4 4 4 12
thermaltake [B]700w[/B]
Mobo - Asus PK5
CPU - Intel QX6850
GPU 8800GTX SLI
Memory Corsair 8GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator
Sound - X-FI
PSU - PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool [B]1KW[/B]-SR
Intel E6320
Asus P5B Deluxe
4x1 Corsair XMS2 DDR800
1xRaptor 74gb HD
2x160GB sata HD
1xWD 500GB Sata
XFI Xtrememusik
Nec 7140 DVDRW
Geforce 8800GTS 640mb
Corsair [B]620W[/B]
I mean, look at the last one here... a PC that maybe sucks 300W under load and a €130 PSU. Do you honestly think he made an informed decision when we came up with that particular configuration? He could have used the €80 to upgrade the CPU from a 1.80GHz to a 2.40GHz model... that would certainly have had more of an impact on performance than paying for PSU capacity that just sits there unused.
Maybe they won't absolutely need it NOW. But PCs show no sign of going down in power requirements. A strong PSU can move on up intothe next system the user buys.
Actually, PCs do go down in power requirements. RAM is becoming less power consuming with every consecutive generation, so are CPUs. Compare a C2D to it's predecessor, the P4 Pressler... or AMD's X2 EE CPUs to earlier X2s (i.e. Toledo and Manchester cores). A dual-core X2 5200+ EE has about the same TDP as a single-core Athlon 64 3000+ had one year ago and a 30% lower TDP than the non-EE X2 5200+ a few months ago.
Video cards are the main culprit and it's not THAT bad. For example, a 8800GTS draws less power than a previous generation X1900XT 256mb, which wasn't even a high-end offering. The 8800 GTX only draws slightly more power than the X1950XTX, the previous generation's fastes card.
Also, you can't just look at the wasteful ultra-high-end segment, where you have retardedly overvolted CPUs like the QX6700, which sucks 30% more power while only offering a very mild speed bump over the Q6600, not even to mention AMD's FX processors or the whole Quad-FX platform debacle.
