Wasting Money on Power Supplies: How Many Watts You Need for a PC PSU (2020)

this content looks at power consumption benchmarks for various configurations for what we think to be likely common pc built it serves as a bit of a template to help guide you in what power supply should be purchasing purely in terms of capacity of the power supply for an upcoming build so we do independent power consumption testing for components cpu gpu stuff like that but we haven't really looked at total system consumption for a lot of different configs that's what we're doing today it ranges from the 10900k and 2080 ti at the higher end of power consumption down to something like a 3300x and 5500 xt so let's get into it before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamers nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes e-commerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gm full time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace we'll talk about this a little bit more as we go but there's a lot more to buying a power supply obviously than just the wattage that is the one thing we're focusing on today though just be aware that there are more things to consider for example all the way down to just wire gauge if you're planning to do overclocking you might need to consider if the cheap power supply or cable extensions in consideration could potentially cause issues for you in terms of wire gauge you also have to consider things like just overall efficiency and even something a bit simpler like compatibility with your wall outlet if you're maybe in a different region where the power supply might not be targeted or built for that specific region for this we wanted to keep a fixed set of components to the extent possible that is so things like the ram and the ssds they're not changing the fans they're not changing that's all fixed for all the systems the only thing we're really changing is the cpu and the gpu and with that sometimes there's a motherboard change as well for this testing we used a specialized logging power meter that captures the data sitting between the power supply and the wall four times per second and that allows us to produce interesting charts like overtime data where we can actually see the change in power consumption if for example the load changes or if the cpu exits tau if there's an expiry of the turbo boosting duration on something like a 10 900 k we can see that materialize in a line graph rather than just having a running number that we're spot checking so this is a good way to do this now for individual component consumption it is best to check just with say eps 12 volt numbers for the cpu if you can't do the back of the socket that is or you could do pcie 12 volt numbers plus the pcie slot numbers for the gpu but that's not our goal today we're not doing cpu versus cpu power consumption we're doing total system to help figure out how much power you need because a lot of people are criminally over purchasing on their power supply requirements in terms of wattage now one other point here the rtx 3000 series coming up there's a whole lot of rumors out there we're ignoring all those today the cool thing about this type of data is that because we've already in the past provided individual component power consumption and now we're giving you system power consumption you can just start looking at the deltas of okay if we're using a 2080 ti and a 100k and you end up doing a 10900k and a 3080 you can look at when it comes out our numbers of the 30 80 power consumption versus the 2080 ti power consumption standalone take a delta add that to these numbers and then that's the power supply requirement you would need to meet a couple of considerations here so power supply testing or at least the wattage requirement testing does mean that the efficiency of the power supply we're using will change depending on how much load it's under as such with one power supply for all configurations its efficiency and therefore its power throughput will change at the extremes to try and solve this to the extent reasonable we use the corsair ax1600i titanium rated power supply as long as you bake some room into the power numbers which you should be doing anyway our results will get you into territory we consider to be close enough remember if you're looking at 500 watt peak power consumption you don't need a 500 watt power supply you need something closer to 650 to 700 watts and yes you could get away with 600 watts too it depends on the efficiency curve to prove this point we'll borrow one chart from an intact review of the corsair ax1600i in this chart in its hotbox load testing you can see that they determined a 200 watt system load had the power supply in the 93 efficiency range whereas the peak of its curve is closer to 700 watts to 900 watts for about 96 efficiency note also this number will change a bit based on other factors like where it's plugged in if you have 115 volt outlet or something else like 220 and things like the temperature of the unit now no testing is perfect and we find it important to note the methodological shortcomings and challenges that we face in testing so that was the main one here where for this kind of test we could take a power supply we consider to be appropriate for each build and test that but then you're playing around with a whole bunch of other factors that we didn't want to consider for this so we're getting into pretty damn close territory and then you can extrapolate the rest this power supply is a good one and it's going to get us relatively clean data with minimal peak to peak variance after that's accomplished your main consideration is efficiency if you're going to buy a 400 watt power supply that doesn't bear an 80 plus rating it might not deliver the power truly needed further still keep in mind that power supplies can split the amount of current rated for each 12 volt rail so if you have a power supply that claims let's say 400 watts of total capacity but it's splitting to where it's got two 12 volt rails and each one can do 100 or 200 watts or whatever the case may be depending on how the math works out 200 in this case then you can't really drive all that power into one component so if you're running a cpu that can take up to this is a kind of unreasonable scenario but so you take up to 250 watts and your 12 volt line can only do 200 even though the power supply is 400 watts total it doesn't really help you so that's something to look at as well but that's outside of the scope of this piece so as stated there's a lot more to consider but let's get into just the numbers for the power supply wattage requirements for a few different configurations and we'll put those configurations on the screen now as well we'll start our charts with a 100 torture workload which places both the cpu and the gpu under complete system load you'll almost never encounter this in a gaming scenario because most games end up loading one component more heavily than the other for workstation scenarios it's possible to end up at 100 system load for a simulation or a render leveraging both the cpu and the gpu folding at home would be more of a pedestrian example that most people are familiar with while deep learning ai work or even something like blender would be another example where you can easily load both components in the system this test is conducted with our blender torture workload running alongside furmark loading both the cpu and the gpu completely for each component this is something of a worst case power scenario here's the chart our r5 3600 and rtx 2060 ko configuration required just 307 watts for this without overclocking either so you could be comfortable with a 450 to 600 watt power supply depending on how much overhead you want for future upgrades overclocking and how close to the peak of the efficiency curve you want to be the 3300 x and 5500 xt configuration required roughly the same amount of power with a 3700x and 5700xt we've now upgraded the gpu and the cpu alike and both require more power independently than the previous two built if you look at our reviews for each individual part you'll see how these add together to equal about the same amount of power as we're seeing here 361 watts in this case which is just behind the pure gaming builds power requirement at 384 watts either of these would be comfortable with a 500 watt or 600 watt power supply an rtx 2080 super and 10600k or the 2080 ti with the same all end up in the 420 to 440 watt range when fully loaded and we don't breach the 500 watt wall until the 10900k and the 2080 ti in that configuration the short duration test runs 67 watts higher than the long duration test that's not news that's because intel's turbo boosting policy has us running extra power for about a minute before it dies down and we talk about that in the 10900k review if you're curious about how exactly that works thus far you can see how so many people overbuy on their wattage requirements if you ran a 3990x as a higher end example that cpu alone runs about 220 watts so that put us within 20 watts of the short term duration for the 10 900k standalone this plot will be for the overtime power consumption of just the 10 900k and 2080 ti built for the 100k build you can see that the load really kicks in at 28 seconds when it start really starts when everything's launched and then it falls down at about 72 seconds so we're right around the expected turbo duration window for intel's 10900k that dip after 70 seconds is from the cpu spinning down to a more sustainable clock which also brings it closer to the 120 to 125 watt number associated with intel's advertised tdp our next chart starts a look at games for this one we're testing total system power consumption while playing red dead redemption 2 tested under both 1080p and 4k settings we used our gpu review settings for red dead 2 positioning it with high settings overall the 4k load shifts the utilization almost entirely to the gpu with the cpu obviously doing more when less gpu constrained like at 1080p here's the chart the power consumption range here is as low as 211 watts and as high as 431 watts the 5500xt and 3300x budget gamer build could handle this game with about a 400 to 450 watt power supply and be completely fine but you also have to account for those bursted full load scenarios shown in the previous chart should they happen so you'd still ideally account for a higher power workload even if it's not expected to happen frequently further there's a point of diminishing returns where a lot of the 400 watt power supplies end up being lower quality proportionally when compared to their 450 to 500 watt counterparts this makes it more worth buying a tick up anyway once you're this low on power capacity just to get overall better unit quality there are companies that make good 400 watt power supplies but the ability to actually get one right now is not particularly hot in a sense you can think of this like how true 26 66 megahertz ram is about the same price as 3 000 of a similar latency these days or even a better one and that's because 2666 isn't really getting made anymore at this point at least not in the types of kits we're talking about as for the r5 3600 and 2060 ko mid-range gamer build that one pulls about 255 watts and power consumption ticks up about 10 watts at 4k because the gpu becomes more fully engaged we are more cpu bound at 1080p so that's the reasoning for the difference in power consumption the 10600k and 2070 super see similar behavior except at 311 to 320 watts it's not until upgrading to a 2080 ti that we see power push past 400 watts the disparity between 1080p and 4k power consumption once again only flips because of which component gets the most load in the case of the 10900k there's also some consideration of turbo duration limits for example if we were to pull data from just the first 50 to 60 seconds of gaming the power consumption number would be higher overall because the cpu would be pulling harder but most people don't really game for a minute at a time so we're looking at the more aggregate number and after considering tau expiry our next test is the grand strategy campaign game total war three kingdoms tested with ultra settings this is the most abusive gpu workload we'll produce during this set of test data for this configuration the maximum power consumption is about 420 watts when running 1080p with the 2080 ti and 10900k power consumption for this config drops to 382 watts under a gpu focused load as the cpu power requirement falls disproportionately compared to the gpu power requirement increase in other words at 1080p the gpu is doing more work than the cpu is doing at 4k and so power runs higher at 1080p with both components more equally loaded in fact for most of these configurations power consumption is higher at 1080p in this game all of the battle simulation and total war creates additional cpu load which contributes partially to this behavior for the 3300x and 5500 xt build you'd again be fine between 400 watts and 500 watts depending on if you're seeking certain power supply qualities that might not exist at the lower end of the range the 2060 ko and the 3600 build meanwhile which we imagine is likely one of the most common configurations would do well with a 450 to 550 watt power supply while allowing some expansion or oc headroom the 2070 super and 10600k build would be covered by a 500 to 600 watt power supply while the higher end 10600k and 2080 ti build would be covered by a 600 watts a 700 watt power supply depending on how much room you want for later again that include things like overclocking considerations because if you're on a k-sku we'd imagine you'll probably do that at some point even if it's later in the life of the system keep in mind that you'll want to account for a 100 system load scenario too like the one we showed in the first chart f1 2019 is our next game proving the point of the previous games that power numbers are within 10 percent of most measurements game to game the buying requirements haven't shifted much if at all and that's part of the points for this content generally speaking you're going to have two load scenarios for consideration one is with gaming where either the cpu is at 100 or the gpu is and if neither of them is it's probably some external limitation that might include something like an engine limitation for these two options power will lean higher under either a cpu load or a gpu load but will still be close from game to game unless you have a drastic difference in component selection for example if you were to combine a 300 watt gpu when it's under full full 100 load with a 65 watt cpu we'd expect to see significantly higher power consumption when it's properly leveraged on the gpu like in 4k gaming and there's not much cpu load at all meanwhile with the same configuration if you are completely cpu bound with your 65 watt cpu and the gpu is unable to really do anything obviously your power is going to skew lower in requirements than it would in the former scenario not much has changed on this chart versus the aggregate of the previous results aside from the burn-in testing in the first chart requiring the most overall power we did take data for more games like gta 5 but this is enough to prove the point and we'll save everyone the time the rest of the charts are all about the same as the previous three with only minor differences in wattage for each test let's look at another one so rather than a game for this one we're using 3dmark time spot which is a synthetic load that is somewhat similar to gaming in the way it loads the components but does a few things differently we plotted both cpu power consumption as a metric and the gt2 metric the latter of which focuses more on gpu memory load overall the cpu load which is a physics simulation that would represent some cpu physics lane games didn't exceed 200 watts except for twice once was with the 3900x and 2080 ti where the 3900x tipped the total system load power consumption during the cpu test of 217 watts and remember this is still total system load for cpu only numbers you'd have to check our cpu reviews and then the other one was the 10900 k which ran a total system power consumption of 254 watts that's with cpu only power consumption at around 200 watts or so and you've got the rest of room for other components as for gpu load with gt2 testing the power consumption was around 400 watts in the worst case and 212 watts in the lightest case with the 3300x and 5500xt this mostly matches our game tests but scales more cleanly across the gpus to show a clear progression our last one is with blender we'll briefly put a power consumption chart on the screen from our latest cpu reviews we typically use this workload to present component-only power consumption as you can see in this chart from our cpu reviews and we measure against the eps 12 volt cables or if it's for a gpu the pcie power input in this scenario we're taking total system power so numbers are up overall versus being from the cpu-only power consumption chart this isn't as good of a cpu to cpu comparison and shouldn't be treated that way that's what our normal charts are for that said it is good to help put into perspective what those cpu-only numbers mean in terms of buying a power supply because you still have to account for the rest of the system for total system power the 10900 k's short-term power consumption runs 271 watts which is 70 watts higher than its stable baseline after the first 56 seconds or so that's due to the boosting duration limits as we've now seen a few times nothing exceeds 300 watts here as stated a few times in this video there are a few other considerations beyond just the capacity of the power supply to think about less power hungry setups are a great example of this although some of these configurations could get by on 400 watts just fine the problem that emerges is one of quality of the power supply at 400 watts just like with ram there's sort of a baseline quality where even though it's possible to build a really good 400 watt power supply most companies don't bother you might have to bump up say to 450 or 500 watts as a baseline to get other features in the power supply that you want that might not be brought down to the 400 watt tiers that's because the baseline per unit cost is high enough that manufacturers have a hard time justifying a higher quality lower wattage atx power supply especially when fighting a marketing battle where people are gonna go well this one's 400 and it cost the same as that 500 watt one so i'm gonna buy the 500 watt one every configuration we tested today for the scenarios we test would be completely fine on a 600 watt power supply that doesn't mean you should buy a 600 watt power supply but it illustrates the point that you don't need 1000 watt power supplies for this type of setup there are scenarios where that starts to matter multi-gpu or you start running things like complicated storage arrays with a dozen hard drives in the mix or you start thinking about uh if you're going to have multi-socket solutions maybe you're running heavier overclocks for example a 10980 xe we can easily get into the hundreds of watts territory with overclocking we've had them running at 500 plus in some of our tests in the past so overclocking is a major consideration as well and that's one where you should consider baking in some additional overhead for any overclocking efforts fortunately we have overclocked numbers in the per component reviews so although we don't have them here if you want to know how much power 10900k draws at its max overclock with a voltage that's reasonable keeping in mind here that every overclock is going to be a bit different yours might not require the same voltage hours did but you can look at our review for it check the overclocked versus stock power consumption numbers and take that delta and then you can kind of bake that in as your extra headroom if you plan to do similar overclocking other stuff to consider too is of course things like motherboards and their auto voltages a lot of the times auto vcore runs really high and kind of aggressive and you can often tune that down manually and have the cpu run cooler for one but also have a draw less power so depending on which board you're using these numbers will change a little bit if it's one of the ones that runs really aggressively like the old gigabyte boards where they'd shove 1.4 volts into a 7 700 k that could run adequately on like 1.2 so something to think about as well so that's it for this one then again this was purely focused on the question of power supply capacity not anything else in the power supply space there's a lot more to know out there and obviously if you're interested in this stuff you should go research that as well but in terms of capacity hopefully this helps illustrate that you don't need as much power as a lot of people seem to think and one final note too here is that we've noticed that with oems and system integrators a lot of the time the sis will also oversupply you for your power supply versus the system they're selling you and one reason for that that we don't talk about a lot is just because the business of it where they start talking about let's say their power supply supplier has a whole bunch of power supplies of a certain capacity maybe 150 watts and they want to move them so there might be a rebate exchange or mdf marketing development fund or some kind of exchange between the si and the power supply supplier where upon the systems being built are getting shipped out the door with say 850 watts because that supports their entire range of configs maybe the top end build really does need that 850 and the lower end only needs 400 but if they're able to scale it more easily in a business sense sometimes you'll see it over supplied from sis as well so that's it for this one if you want to support us directly as always you can go to store.gamersnexus.net to pick up a medium modmat or a mousemat both of which are in stock and shipping now or you can go to patreon.com gamersnexus links in the description below for additional resources and information thanks for watching we'll see you all next time so

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,171,393

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, how many watts gaming pc, how many watts power supply, how many watts psu, how many watts do you need psu, gaming pc power supply, gaming pc how many watts, power supply calculator

Id: X_wtoCBahhM

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/hibbel]

And here I am with a 650W PSU powering a 980 and a 4790K, both with no / very mild OC.

Why is the PSU that beefy? It means that at full blast, it delivers just shy of 40% of its max output and its fan stays off. The one fan I couldn’t replace with quiet Noctuas stays off. Blessed silence.

[u/smnzer]

People generally overestimate their PSU requirements.

Assuming the stock 3090 is 300-400W at peak, you could probably get away with a 650W PSU, or 750W for breathing room. Peak total system power consumption in synthetic tests of the 10900K and the 2080Ti was around 550W in this video - gaming tests peaked at around 500W. Most people can't afford or choose not to buy those high-end components. As Steve said, this excludes anything fancy like 10+ HDD setups.

The vast majority of gaming builds should get a great quality 550W PSU and call it a day. Anyone else buying top-end components would be fine with a 750W PSU including non-power modding overclocking.

[u/waeeo]

Is there really any point in looking at all these non-peak scenarios? Seems like peak synthetic load is the only relevant one when determining how much wattage capacity you need. I wouldn't consider a system that can run games but will power itself off under a stress test to be acceptably configured.

But even the 100% torture scenario's numbers aren't that useful since there's no overclocked system configurations being compared. Yeah, extreme sub-ambient overclocking power draw is not relevant to most people, but surely it's worth showing what the numbers can be like for a typical watercooled OC.

I feel like this video needs a followup.

[u/XorFish]

There are plenty 450W-650W PSUs that are nearly silent.

Isn't the power draw rating for what you can pull from the PSU and not what goes in into it?

This overestimates the power draw for the lower wattage builds because a 1600W PSU isn't that efficient in this range.

This is another issue with high wattage PSUs, they are less efficient at the typical load level. I didn't look at the specification, but a 550W gold PSU is most likely more efficient in the 100-200W range than a 750 W Platinum PSU.

[u/Orelha1]

A very much needed article/video. I'm seeing some people lose their fucking minds and going for 850w and 1000w just because of some rumors and that seasonic adaptor leak.

[u/really-likes-tea]

I use a 450W PSU with R5 2600 and 2060 Super, I don't think they've managed to pull more than 300W DC combined. And since I will most likely skip RTX 3000 series, that isn't changing anytime soon. But I do understand the extra peace of mind you get with having 200-300W headroom.

I did consider larger PSU with fanless operation, but if I'm pulling extra power, my GPU and CPU fan will ramp up anyway, so I thought why bother.

[u/Charwinger21]

Really happy GN put this video together. Been seeing a surge in people recommending wildly overspecced PSUs lately (especially for mid-range builds).

 

Over in /r/buildapcforme and /r/buildapc I've recently had people downvote me for things like... recommending against using a $200 850W RMx in a non-OCed 3900X+3090 build that was right up against the budget (to the point where the build had just a 1TB P1 and a 2 TB Barracuda Compute in a video editing build...)

[u/Fireflair_kTreva]

There are other concerns.

One, many PSUs have ECO modes of some sort that roughly equate to <50% loading doesn't require a fan to run for cooling. Less noise and that much less wear and tear on the component. This alone is reason enough for many people to get an oversized PSU.

Two, cost. The cost difference for a gold rated PSU of 550W, 650W and 750W is often not much. $10-$20, but very brand dependent. If I can pick up 100W of power rating, and that much more head room to have the availability of ECO mode, it's certainly worth it.

Three, you don't know where the power requirements are going to go. Recent years have seen a decline in power requirements as die size shrank for the CPU and GPU, your major power consumers. But the GPU demands are going up again. The 30 series are expected to be power hogs compared to the 20 series. So if you were conservative on your PSU in your last build and got a 450W which only gave you 50-100W of overhead, now you might be hitting your PSU's limits in your new build, necessitating a new PSU anyway. And buying a new PSU when you could have your old one last longer is definitely not wise financially.

Lastly there is warranty. Most major brand PSUs at 650W and below come with a 5 year warranty. At about 750W and above they go to a 10 year warranty. That might be incentive enough to get the bigger PSU too. I've had the same EVGA G2 750W for about 10 years without any signs of problems. I expect I'll keep using it until a change in power pin construction and supply voltages requires me to change PSUs.

[u/MagicOrpheus310]

I have a 1200w but only because it was on sale cheaper than the 800w I was planning on...

That said, two 1080tis with a 3700x and it's idling right on 90w

I think it hit 680w during a stress test once, but could have been 580w I'm not sure haha I tried, like, I really really tried to blow its arse out and could not get a bead of sweat out of it!! From memory, Red dead 2 with all the bells and whistles hits around 480w but I can't remember if that was with a 2070s or the tenayedeeteeii twins...

Either way what I'm trying to say is that, yeah, just because Linus uses 1000w+ doesn't mean anybody (with a budget) has to!! Haha