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What difference does the power supply make?

Please read the stickies provided in the first page of the power supply forum. Or perhaps go to google or howthingswork and find out yourself.

If you want a concise answer: "more stuff" sounds right. What "stuff"? Go find out yourself.

-J.
 
The wattage isn't the only factor. The "cleanliness" of the power sent to the components is equally important. If you care about your system, don't use a generic PSU.
 
He didn't say, "What are the advantages of more watts in a Power Supply?", did he?

*Sigh*-- I'll just give the answer away. The main reason to have a more powerful power supply is to ensure long running uptime of your system without any power issues a.k.a. stability.

-J.
 
Generally speaking all the above holds true
a supply that has a fat safety margin will not only have a greater life expectancy
but also will be able to deal with more variables than a supply that is loaded right up next to its load capacity

those variables generally are
Temperature,
the hotter the air entering the supply the less heat its able to transfer to the air from its own heatsinks and the less total watts its able to produce

Transient Response
the ability for the supply to regulate the various output voltage rails to within spec
when under a dynamic load, as components alter the amount of power they are drawing overshoot and undershoot occurs and those need to be dampened within a time period
or fry components

AC Regulation
the ability of the supply to deal with variation from the wall outlet and convert it into useable DC power (specifically the rails above +3.3Volt, +5Volt and +12Volt (in some supplies up to four seperate +12V rails)

but watts alone dont mean jack, its the proper distribution as amps to the rails you need for the configuration your running, and how well they are able to deal with the above variables, a better and larger supply typically gives you a wider range of issue free operation before it safely shuts off because it cant deal with em any more, whereas a cheaper power supply (even with more watts) can lack those protection mechanism and pass on power out of spec that the mobo's voltage regulation scheme is unable to deal with (or a drive) and you loose the magic smoke that makes all electronics work :p

personally I generally run supplies at between 1\3 to 1\2 higher amps than a calculator says i need
for more info see > http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=779582
 
Derating is the only real reason to get a more powerful power supply - generally a more powerful supply will last longer. But that only goes so far - if you pull 200W from a 300W supply, it should last more or less forever.

There's also the whole upgradability thing, having more watts for future upgrades, but IMO computers have probably hit their peak power output - there's a reason AMD/Intel/etc are going multicore instead of trying to scale to obscene clock frequencies and suck huge amounts of power. People don't really want to buy noisy space heaters for computers...

In reality, not many computers draw more than a couple hundred watts. My computer (oc'ed 2.3GHz AXP + 9500NP + 1HD + 2CD) pulls only 160W from the wall... and hell, a *server* I worked on a few days ago with dual P2's and 7 SCSI drives only had a 280W PSU!
 
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