Calculating Power Supply Needs

[SockPuppet]

Hello,

 

I am building a home Plex server/Network attached storage and I am having difficulty figuring out how many watts I need to power it, my components are as follows:

 

(1) Intel Xeon E-2136 Coffee Lake 3.3 GHz LGA 1151 80W BX80684E2136 Server Processor

(1) SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SCH-LN4F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1151 Intel C246

(4) Supermicro 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 2666 (PC4-21300) Server Memory (MEM-DR416L-HL01-EU26)

(2) 256GB Intel SSDPEKKA256G801 DC P4101 Series M.2 2280 PCI-E x4 SSD

(8) Seagate Exos X16 14TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Data Center HDD Enterprise Hard Drive (ST14000NM001G)

(1) 10GBASE-T network card, have not yet decided which one

 

I have looked at several PSU calculators online and I cannot seem to find one that has my exact mobo and cpu listed on it and so I am still unsure what my power supply needs are. One source indicated 650W would be adequate and another said I only needed 300W. I intend for this server to run for many years and be on 24/7 so I do not want to make a mistake on such a critical component. Any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

[jaslion]

A cx 450w psu should be good to go for this

[SockPuppet]

11 minutes ago, jaslion said:

A cx 450w psu should be good to go for this

Hi Jaslion,

 

Thank you for your response, could you possibly explain how you arrived at 450W? I am having difficulty understanding the individual power needs of each component. For the CPU, newegg shows 80W as the requirement. The M.2 NVME SSD's show on newegg as needing 3.5W while active and since I intend the OS to be mirrored on those drives I am assuming they will always be active, but I really do not know. As for the HDD's, Seagate's datasheet shows 5W idle and 10.2W read 6.2W write, so with some liberal rounding I'm guessing maybe 90-100W for al 8 HDDs? For the motherboard and RAM I have been unsuccessful in locating the power requirements. I have read the user manual for the mobo and cannot find anything in it but I may be looking in the wrong place. A guy at my local Microcenter told me 150W was fine for a motherboard but that number is anecdotal. Going with those numbers it would seem 350W would be adequate. But I don't want to cut it too close so 450W may be exactly what I need as you say. I guess my question is, is there any downside to having a much larger power supply than you actually need to run the components? Would an 850W PSU work better as it would be rated for much higher loads but never actually be used anywhere near it's max load?

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

[Ankerson]

8 minutes ago, SockPuppet said:

Would an 850W PSU work better as it would be rated for much higher loads but never actually be used anywhere near it's max load?

 

The PSU will only supply the power that is requested by the system.

 

Over provisioning is not a bad thing to give room for future builds and upgrades. In the end it really is up to you and what you may be planning in the future.

 

For THAT computer I wouldn't go more than say a 550W PSU.

 

But if you have plans to build a high end PC with a high end graphics card then go ahead and get a good high quality 850W PSU since you would be using it and need it later.

[jaslion]

43 minutes ago, SockPuppet said:

Hi Jaslion,

 

Thank you for your response, could you possibly explain how you arrived at 450W? I am having difficulty understanding the individual power needs of each component. For the CPU, newegg shows 80W as the requirement. The M.2 NVME SSD's show on newegg as needing 3.5W while active and since I intend the OS to be mirrored on those drives I am assuming they will always be active, but I really do not know. As for the HDD's, Seagate's datasheet shows 5W idle and 10.2W read 6.2W write, so with some liberal rounding I'm guessing maybe 90-100W for al 8 HDDs? For the motherboard and RAM I have been unsuccessful in locating the power requirements. I have read the user manual for the mobo and cannot find anything in it but I may be looking in the wrong place. A guy at my local Microcenter told me 150W was fine for a motherboard but that number is anecdotal. Going with those numbers it would seem 350W would be adequate. But I don't want to cut it too close so 450W may be exactly what I need as you say. I guess my question is, is there any downside to having a much larger power supply than you actually need to run the components? Would an 850W PSU work better as it would be rated for much higher loads but never actually be used anywhere near it's max load?

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

cpu: 80w

Drives: 8*10w

Motherboard: 15w

Ram: 1.5*2w

So yeah even with all this already no worries that system would really need to go 100% to get close to 300w even but there are basically no good 300w psu's hence the 450w recommendtion of a cx450 (gray label)