How to Pick the Right PSU for Your Next Gaming PC Build! 🛠️ [Options for All Budgets]

when it comes to selecting PC components people often spend a lot of time on Parts like the CPU and GPU and smaller components like the power supply often run the risk of becoming a bit of an afterthought but for such an important component to get right it makes sense to do a little bit of research and ensure you get the best option for your build but equally with so much technical terminology from Fall factor to efficiency ratings to modularity to PCI G 5 power cables how do you know which one is right for your build and how do you pick apart a good PSU from a bad well in this video I'm going to tell you all you need to know about picking a power supply for your next build so you can get it right without too much hassle let's do this there is admittedly a lot of terminology to unpick here so let's start off with the big stuff but feel free to skip through to any section in the timestamps below you might find particularly interest in the biggest piece of terminology to understand is wattage and the question I get all the time is James how many watts do I need for my power supply a tlight PC P part picker is a great way to understand the base wattage of a PC build but PC part picker is just that a base wattage if you use this as your absolute figure and don't add any head room you are going to come into problems whether it's the fact that your CPU has a boost behavior that consumes another 50 or 100 Watts or the fact that you've got an auto overclock on your CPU or GPU which is sipping a bit more power it's important to have enough headro room for future upgrades is also really nice to have that's not to say you should go for a th000 wat power supply in a budget build but keep in mind that if there is a future GPU upgrade you have your eyes on it might make sense to factor in that extra wattage now one of the most fullprof ways of getting the right wattage is actually by looking at your gpu's recommended PSU head to the Nvidia AMD or even Intel website and it will have a recommended wattage for all your favorite graphics cards of course if you've got a build with a particularly highend CPU or a load of extra accessories that are all going to consume power add a bit more Headroom but the GPU figure is always a good one to go off I talked a little bit about about efficiency and that's the next big thing to impact with power supplies you've probably seen on the PSU a little 80 plus symbol let me find the box for this Corsair sf1000 L and if you look closely you'll see in the corner that it says 80 plus gold now 80 plus are a body that PSU manufacturers send their power supplies to they then test the power supplies and give them an efficiency rating these range through from 80 plus white through to bronze silver gold all the way up to the Dizzy Heights of platinum and titanium and the idea is that the higher and more elusive the metal the more efficient the power supply is 80 plus psus rate the power supplies efficiency based on its performance under 20% 50% and 100% load the reality of it is that most of the time your system will only be hitting 10% of the power supplies output capability especially when it's running at Idol but it's when you jump straight into an intense game a war zone 3 and your CPU and GPU to 100% that you need the wattage and the Headroom that comes with it more recently you'll also find a new body called cybernetics have come along long they've proved really popular actually in the community for PSU ratings and they look at things slightly differently the general idea of the system though is similar but they have a range of different rating badges that they award psus based on their performance the idea is that both of these bodies are pretty independent so you can trust them to make sure your power supply has a good rating more commonly than ever 80 plus gold is becoming really widespread for a huge array of the latest units but budget power supplies are always going to be a little bit lower on the Spectrum something like an80 plus bronze rating is not uncommon nor a bad thing for a more entry-level PSU take this Corsair CX 650 as an example and you might notice other things about this budget Corsair power supply that are different to a far higher end and more expensive unit like corsair's RM 1200X I should give a massive thanks by the way to Corsair for sending out all the psus making this video possible now this power supply has all of its cables pre-attached and this is a common trait of a more budget oriented power supply now you won't necessarily need to use all these cables you might not need multiple SATA connections or you might not need cables for three different gpus use but the idea is that you have all the options available to you and on a slightly more budget end power supply with less wattage and less Connections in general this isn't such a big problem as you can tuck these away in your case personally I always prefer a fully modular power supply like this one whereby you get all the connections and all the cables but only plug in the ones that you need something which massively helps with cable management another really important thing to talk about with psus is size and like everything in life it matters now you'll notice that this power supply is considerably smaller than this power supply yet they're both 1,000 Watts now this power supply runs on what we call the sfx form factor there are two main form factors to power supplies ATX and sfx sfx standing for small form factor is often used in much smaller cases where you're trying to build a much smaller system now obviously sfx has trade-offs as cooling becomes a bit more of a challenge trying to squeeze in just as many connections also becomes quite tricky but you might see that your case has a requirement for an sfx PSU if so you want something like this it's also worth noting the length of power supplies depending on the case you get even those that support fulls sizee ATX units there might be a Max PSU length which might make something like this a little bit more difficult to accommodate and something like this a much smaller RM 1000e but the world of PSU cables and efficiency has got more complicated recently and you've also probably seen the Advent of a PCI gem 5 power connector and this word ATX 3.0 what on Earth does it mean ATX 3.0 is basically a new power supply standard derived by Intel that looks to usher in the next gener generation of psus most new psus will be atx3 and on the higher end it's something you definitely want to look for they were expensive but they're getting a lot cheaper and kind of becoming the expected standard in much of the industry nowadays atx3 has loads of really complicated PSU jargon and requirements and standards that brands are expected to adhere to but also you'll find in atx3 power supplies the inclusion of this a PCI gem 5 power cable pretty much as standard now these cables are capable of delivering varying amounts of wattage I've seen them go as high as like 600 wats on some power supplies great for not only cards like the 490 which consum have Fair bit of power but also good for cards moving into the future the idea with the PCI gem 5 power cable is that it replaces the need to have two three or even four six plus TW pin GPU power connections personally I'm a big fan of the PCI G 5 power cable and while AMD haven't adopted it yet if I'm being honest with Ron RX 8000 or whatever they end up calling it is something that I would expect to become much more m M stream and more common there are a couple of other key features to note that you might find on some power supply units many have what we call a zero RPM mode this basically takes the fan in the power supply and turns it off when the PSU is at low load or low temperatures something which helps with the Acoustics of your system some psus also have fully digital software control like this one that integrates with Corsair IQ via an internal USBC connection and what that's going to do is allow you to monitor in your system and optimize to a degree the power of your build and what power consumption is being used at any one time it's also of course worth reading the reviews of power supplies it sounds so simple but there's often nothing better than end user experience and of course the experience of experts and review Publications like ourselves Linked In the description below to learn exactly Which models are and aren't recommended you'll also see Brands like Corsair who kindly sponsored this video release cold Innovations like this this is their rmx shift range and you can see here that all the cables are on the side and not on the end and what it means is that once your PSU is installed into the build it's still easy to actually install extra cables as you go this is good for novice Builders who might install the PSU first without any of the cables attached and then have to struggle otherwise to get the cables in or perhaps more commonly and more sensibly for those looking to upgrade an existing system it's really easy because all you do is find the little 12pin slot on the end of the power supply and you just slot the cable in nice and easily it doesn't matter then if this PSU is already installed in the case the cable is side mounted and easy to access in fact rather unsurprisingly and as you can see from the endless number of power supplies on the table Corsair also do have a range of psus available and we've genuinely over the years had some really great experiences when it comes to Corsair power supplies in a range of our builds and talking more generally there's loads of scare running that goes on with power supplies some of the overcurrent protections are really good and I remember when we had I think it was the 3070 in for the first time and weren't sure about the power consumption and talking quite honestly ended up running it on a power supply that wasn't sufficient the PSU didn't fry the system didn't set on fire and burn the PSU just cut out and the build turned off before any problems arose that's not to say you want to buy a power supply that isn't quite good enough but you'd be remarkably impressed at how low power consumption can really be on lots of the latest systems and components I'll leave links to the full corset range of psus down in the description below and a big thank you the Corsair for helping make this video possible if you enjoyed it go subscribe drop a like right thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one

Channel: GeekaWhat

Views: 31,267

Keywords: geekawhat

Id: Xx6rFaKaqp0

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023