About "Load Wattage"

[Auberdine]

When I read this on the calculator what does it mean? E.g 475W means that's the idle consumption or the max W the PC will be needing when everything (even fans, optical drives, hard drives, etc) are at 100% at the same time?

 

Thanks.

[mariushm]

The max the pc will consume if both your CPU and your video card are running at 100%

 

There's fairly small difference between power consumption at idle and load for hard disks, ssd drives, fans etc ... all of these usually consume under 10 watts each (6-8 watts for hard drives, 2 watts for fans, 2-3 watts idle for SSD drives and up to 10-15w when writing data to them)

 

At idle, when you're browsing the internet, watching movies on youtube, working in some application like Word, Excel etc ... both the processor and the video card will reduce their frequencies, turn off unused cpu cores, reduce memory frequencies, in order to save power.

 

Modern computers in general consume less than 100 watts when idle, unless you have a lot of hard drives or other things that don't reduce their power when idle (technically hard drives can reduce their power or go in stand-by when not used, but in general it's not recommended to let them, it's better to just let them run 24/7)

 

Calculators are often wrong about how much power systems will use.  If you want some feedback on a configuration , ask away and some of us who are knowledgeable may answer with more accurate numbers.

[Auberdine]

44 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The max the pc will consume if both your CPU and your video card are running at 100%

 

There's fairly small difference between power consumption at idle and load for hard disks, ssd drives, fans etc ... all of these usually consume under 10 watts each (6-8 watts for hard drives, 2 watts for fans, 2-3 watts idle for SSD drives and up to 10-15w when writing data to them)

 

At idle, when you're browsing the internet, watching movies on youtube, working in some application like Word, Excel etc ... both the processor and the video card will reduce their frequencies, turn off unused cpu cores, reduce memory frequencies, in order to save power.

 

Modern computers in general consume less than 100 watts when idle, unless you have a lot of hard drives or other things that don't reduce their power when idle (technically hard drives can reduce their power or go in stand-by when not used, but in general it's not recommended to let them, it's better to just let them run 24/7)

 

Calculators are often wrong about how much power systems will use.  If you want some feedback on a configuration , ask away and some of us who are knowledgeable may answer with more accurate numbers.

Thank you very much. So I guess for a Ryzen 5 1500X and a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 8 GB a 600W 80 plus white PSU is more than enough?

[mariushm]

A ryzen 5 1500x will use at most around 70-90w on stock (default) frequencies, 100-120 watts with some simple overclocking (let's say like rising voltage to 1.35v and 3.7..3.8 ghz on all cores), maybe a tiny bit more if you're going overboard overclocking it all the way to 4 Ghz and raise the voltage all the way to 1.42v.

There's basically no Ryzen processor that uses more than 150 watts even when overclocked to the maximum possible.

 

A RX 580 card will use at most around 230 watts, if you're overclocking it maybe a bit more.

 

The motherboard will use around 20-30 watts, the memory will use around 2-3 watts per memory stick, hard drives around 6-10w like I said

 

So even a 550w power supply will be plenty good, even the most demanding game won't make your power supply go over 400 watts or so. Plenty of spare room from 400w to 550w.

Rather than going with a 600w bronze efficiency, you could go with a 520-550w gold efficiency power supply if it costs around the same.

 

[Auberdine]

Quote

 

Thank you very much!

[STRMfrmXMN]

3 hours ago, Auberdine said:

When I read this on the calculator what does it mean? E.g 475W means that's the idle consumption or the max W the PC will be needing when everything (even fans, optical drives, hard drives, etc) are at 100% at the same time?

 

Thanks.

What are your system specs? I can tell you what, at max load, your system will draw from your PSU.

[Auberdine]

Just now, STRMfrmXMN said:

What are your system specs? I can tell you what, at max load, your system will draw from your PSU.

Specs are:

 

Motherboard: MSI B350 PC Mate
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H90
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury 16 GB DDR4 @ 2400 MHz
Graphics: Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 580 8 GB
Storage: ADATA Ultimate SU800 128 GB M.2 SSD & Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB HDD
I'll also have an optical DVD/RW drive, a FireWire PCI card with a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 connected and 4 140mm on the case

[STRMfrmXMN]

2 minutes ago, Auberdine said:

Specs are:

 

Motherboard: MSI B350 PC Mate
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H90
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury 16 GB DDR4 @ 2400 MHz
Graphics: Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 580 8 GB
Storage: ADATA Ultimate SU800 128 GB M.2 SSD & Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB HDD
I'll also have an optical DVD/RW drive, a FireWire PCI card with a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 connected and 4 140mm on the case

A 1500X and 580 would demand about 250W-275W under load.