How much does each part in a pc need (Volts and amps)

[404ERROR]

i watched one vid from jayztwocents a while ago and he said you need your psu to be able to deliver at least 18 or 20A (cant remember) also what uses the 12V in a pc and what do the other parts need too.

[Guest]

i watched one vid from jayztwocents a while ago and he said you need your psu to be able to deliver at least 18 or 20A (cant remember) also what uses the 12V in a pc and what do the other parts need too.

Most parts use voltages lower than 100 watts, but the Graphics card however uses a bit more depending on the GPU and card manufacturers

 

PcPartpicker has a feature that shows the voltages needed

[GM_Peka]

He said you need a PSU that can push out 20 amps for....what?

[harrynowl]

Well these days the most important rail(s) is the 12V one, for a regular computer around 18A on the 12V rail is fine, and that is typically a 240W PSU, the remaining 20W is provided from the 3V and 5V rails.

 

For a gaming/workstation you need something a bit more substantial, generally most people go for a PSU with around 44A on the 12V rail, for ~530W of power delivered on the 12V, and the remaining power on the 3/5V rails. This would be a 600W PSU.

 

And of course you can go on and have 64A PSUs for multi-GPU users (850W PSU in total, 770W 12V).

 

It's quite difficult to boil everything down to a wattage, generally the CPU and GPU will be the most power hungry components, and then the rest of the system probably accumulates to 50W or less.