PSU website question.

[Poppa_Meth]

Someone posted a link to a website that you can lay out what kind of devices you plan to have in a PC and how much wattage is recommended in the PSU for it. Anyone have that link? I can't find the topic I saw it in.

[ViRaL1]

Here's one. http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

[Poppa_Meth]

Thats the one. Thanks.

[Solarjetman]

Just a word of warning. If you really want to make sure you're getting the right PSU, you need to take the different rails into account. Different components use various voltage lines. For instance hard drives draw most of their power from the 12V rail. While a NIC card will be getting its power from the 5V rail.

Often times a PSU manufacturer will "inflate" the wattage because one of the rails will support a huge load while the others are fairly weak. These are often the typical 550Watt for $80 models. But having a whopping 300Watts on the 5V rail will help squat with a file server that needs lots of hard drives.

[waheed]

Solarjetman is correct, Wattages on their own are rather meanlingless, you also need to take into account the rails.

The majority of pc components mainly draw its power from the 12V rail (like the CPU, MB, GPU etc) so the 12V rail is the most important one. Look for one with with at least 25A on the 12V rail for a decent system setup.

[Poppa_Meth]

Actually I'm not buying a new PSU, I was just trying to get a basic idea if the system I have will support the extra hardware I want to add. I have a Dell 8300 and I'm not sure yet whether it has their 250 or 305 watt. Dell doesn't use peak rating like most PSU do so that's misleading enough. I also hear that the 12v rail is decent on the Dell PSU but the other rails are a bit on the weak side. I have to find some time to pull the air duct out so I can see which PSU mine has since the info panel is blocked by the duct.