G
GreenMonkey
Once upon a time, in one tube of many many tubes in a series called the interwebs there was a green monkey. He was a happy monkey and his avatar had a smiling happy monkey eating an ice cream cone. Untill one day when he went to the tech talk and tech help forums and continuously found people talking about topics they didnt know about - as if they did - and giving out bad or uneeded advice. Now look at my avatar, It's angry and pointing. Maybe because of you!
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What the crap is a Watt anyhow?
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Well, electricity is basically a charictorization of the movement of electrons. Without getting too far into chemistry or quantum physics, an atom is made up of posatively and negatively charged particals. The negatively charged particals, called electrons, have a charge of −1.6022×10−19 coulombs per electron.
Inside a wire (lets say a copper wire) the copper attoms are very close together. When an electron is added to one end of the wire, it slams into the first copper atom and knocks out one of the first atom's electrons. That free electron slams into the second and this repeats untill eventually an electron is knocked out of the last atom and -poof- you just propegated an electron down a copper wire.
When talking about this movement of electrons, the most important charactoristics are potential and current. Potential (also called voltage) is the ammount of potential energy there is per unit if charge. Where as current is the measure of how many electrons there are flowing past a point at a given time. This is not unlike a river current being the measure of how much water is flowing past a cirtain point at a given time.
At this point - you can go anyplace, voltage and current make up almost everything in electronics. You could, for example, use Ohms law to measure the resistance of something as V = I * R - but instead lets talk about "power".
Power is measured in watts. A watt is the unit of power which represents 1 volt of potential energy with a current of 1 Amp (Amp is the unit for current just liek volt is the measure of potential).
For example: a CDROM drive in a computer operates at 12V DC and can consume at max 2.5 Amps of electricity. The CD drive uses 2.5 * 12, or 30 Watts of power.
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How many watts do I need?
----------------------------------------
Well, that depends on exactly what is in your computer and what you do with it. You can calculate the power you need by the method used above for each component in the computer and then add up all of the wattages. This, however, may be hard since you do not always know how many amps your devices take. However, there are calculators arround the internet which allow you to estimate the wattage of your computer (or intended computer).One such calculator can be found here:
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine But there are many out there.
What is important to understand is that there are two ratings for power consumtion and for power supplies and it is often not clearly labled. Power supplies have a wattage rating often called max wattage, or peak wattage, and they also have a consistant output wattage. Constant output wattage is the important number because it specifies how many watts the supply can generate sustained over time. Max wattage, or peak wattage, is only the absolute maximum power that can be drawn from the device and this peak can usually only last for a couple second or less before the device fails or turns off.
When using a calculator, or buying a PSU, always pay attentin to which they are tlaking about. For example, in my example above, a CD drive can take up to 30Watts of power. However, it only takes that much power when it is first beggining to spin up and requires the most ammount of current. Under consistant and normal operation a CD drive may only take 10 watts of power.
When you apply this to an entire computer system then you can see that even though every component in your computer added together may use 400 watts of power, you almost cirtainly are never actually using 100% of every single component in your computer at the same time (even when burning DVD's while playing games and listening to music
). Not only are you oftne not using every component in your system, but even under intense load you are using your computer components at their consistant average power consumtion rate not at their peak.
Thus, by calculating the total peak wattage needed by you, you have a number which can in practice almost cirtainly never be reaches since everything in your copmuter would not only have to be running at the same time, but also under heavy load and be starting up for the first time. Yikes.
Just in case though, it is common practice to add a little leeway to your power supply just for paranoia.
In 2001-2002 when the athlon XP processors came out I remember how "power hungry" they were and that was the era where everyone switched from 200Watt PSUs to 350Watt. What a high number! Anyways, then with the advent of the nVidia GeForce 6800 ultra nVidia started reccomending people to get 480Watt PSU's. Notice the "reccomended". nVidia had no idea how much power you needed but they figured that the people buying 6800ultras were high end gamers with cash enough to pay for extreme edition pentiums coupled with two of their new fangled 6800 ultras in SLI (power hoggs). Because of this and to be safe they reccomended the 480Watt PSU.
Today, processors are becomming faster without giant leaps in power consumption and we really havnt gone anyplace since the last jump. Just some video card increases so in reality there should still be no need to buy power supplies larger than 480 watts unless you expect SLI videocards to consume more power and still be using the same power supply in 2 years when you upgrade instead of buying the cheaper ones availible then. And even so, with a focus on power savings things shouldnt get to be too bad too quick. Look at the Core2 - twice the performance with significantly less than twice the power consumption.
Lastely, if somebody does have a powersupply which fits their needs, and works with their system, there is absolutely no need, at all, to spew out "zomg!1!1 you need 1500 watts of power or else your a nubzorz!!!!!!!!!11!!!!one!1" because in the end, it is factually inacurate and your making yourself look silly. If you want an easy way to get on my nerves and get me to rant and lecture you then by all means start (or continue in some cases) to give out wrong advice about topics you only think you know about because your friend, who is one grade higher than you and scored one point higher than your 69 on that IQ test you took last week, once said "lolz everyone with intell processors needs 900 watts or more"
If you really want to help then just say that you dont actually know, be honest, and then learn from people who do know. Thats how you actually get smarter, vs just pretending to be.
</rant>
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What the crap is a Watt anyhow?
----------------------------------------
Well, electricity is basically a charictorization of the movement of electrons. Without getting too far into chemistry or quantum physics, an atom is made up of posatively and negatively charged particals. The negatively charged particals, called electrons, have a charge of −1.6022×10−19 coulombs per electron.
Inside a wire (lets say a copper wire) the copper attoms are very close together. When an electron is added to one end of the wire, it slams into the first copper atom and knocks out one of the first atom's electrons. That free electron slams into the second and this repeats untill eventually an electron is knocked out of the last atom and -poof- you just propegated an electron down a copper wire.
When talking about this movement of electrons, the most important charactoristics are potential and current. Potential (also called voltage) is the ammount of potential energy there is per unit if charge. Where as current is the measure of how many electrons there are flowing past a point at a given time. This is not unlike a river current being the measure of how much water is flowing past a cirtain point at a given time.
At this point - you can go anyplace, voltage and current make up almost everything in electronics. You could, for example, use Ohms law to measure the resistance of something as V = I * R - but instead lets talk about "power".
Power is measured in watts. A watt is the unit of power which represents 1 volt of potential energy with a current of 1 Amp (Amp is the unit for current just liek volt is the measure of potential).
For example: a CDROM drive in a computer operates at 12V DC and can consume at max 2.5 Amps of electricity. The CD drive uses 2.5 * 12, or 30 Watts of power.
----------------------------------------
How many watts do I need?
----------------------------------------
Well, that depends on exactly what is in your computer and what you do with it. You can calculate the power you need by the method used above for each component in the computer and then add up all of the wattages. This, however, may be hard since you do not always know how many amps your devices take. However, there are calculators arround the internet which allow you to estimate the wattage of your computer (or intended computer).One such calculator can be found here:
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine But there are many out there.
What is important to understand is that there are two ratings for power consumtion and for power supplies and it is often not clearly labled. Power supplies have a wattage rating often called max wattage, or peak wattage, and they also have a consistant output wattage. Constant output wattage is the important number because it specifies how many watts the supply can generate sustained over time. Max wattage, or peak wattage, is only the absolute maximum power that can be drawn from the device and this peak can usually only last for a couple second or less before the device fails or turns off.
When using a calculator, or buying a PSU, always pay attentin to which they are tlaking about. For example, in my example above, a CD drive can take up to 30Watts of power. However, it only takes that much power when it is first beggining to spin up and requires the most ammount of current. Under consistant and normal operation a CD drive may only take 10 watts of power.
When you apply this to an entire computer system then you can see that even though every component in your computer added together may use 400 watts of power, you almost cirtainly are never actually using 100% of every single component in your computer at the same time (even when burning DVD's while playing games and listening to music
). Not only are you oftne not using every component in your system, but even under intense load you are using your computer components at their consistant average power consumtion rate not at their peak. Thus, by calculating the total peak wattage needed by you, you have a number which can in practice almost cirtainly never be reaches since everything in your copmuter would not only have to be running at the same time, but also under heavy load and be starting up for the first time. Yikes.
Just in case though, it is common practice to add a little leeway to your power supply just for paranoia.
In 2001-2002 when the athlon XP processors came out I remember how "power hungry" they were and that was the era where everyone switched from 200Watt PSUs to 350Watt. What a high number! Anyways, then with the advent of the nVidia GeForce 6800 ultra nVidia started reccomending people to get 480Watt PSU's. Notice the "reccomended". nVidia had no idea how much power you needed but they figured that the people buying 6800ultras were high end gamers with cash enough to pay for extreme edition pentiums coupled with two of their new fangled 6800 ultras in SLI (power hoggs). Because of this and to be safe they reccomended the 480Watt PSU.
Today, processors are becomming faster without giant leaps in power consumption and we really havnt gone anyplace since the last jump. Just some video card increases so in reality there should still be no need to buy power supplies larger than 480 watts unless you expect SLI videocards to consume more power and still be using the same power supply in 2 years when you upgrade instead of buying the cheaper ones availible then. And even so, with a focus on power savings things shouldnt get to be too bad too quick. Look at the Core2 - twice the performance with significantly less than twice the power consumption.
Lastely, if somebody does have a powersupply which fits their needs, and works with their system, there is absolutely no need, at all, to spew out "zomg!1!1 you need 1500 watts of power or else your a nubzorz!!!!!!!!!11!!!!one!1" because in the end, it is factually inacurate and your making yourself look silly. If you want an easy way to get on my nerves and get me to rant and lecture you then by all means start (or continue in some cases) to give out wrong advice about topics you only think you know about because your friend, who is one grade higher than you and scored one point higher than your 69 on that IQ test you took last week, once said "lolz everyone with intell processors needs 900 watts or more"
If you really want to help then just say that you dont actually know, be honest, and then learn from people who do know. Thats how you actually get smarter, vs just pretending to be.
</rant>
