What happens if your power supply doesn't have enough watts?

Guest · Sep 13, 2014

This may be a dumb question, but lets say you have a 500 watt power supply, and your entire system draws exactly 500 watts in idle. At 100% load, your system draws a total of 575 watts.
What happens to your system? Does it turn itself off? Does it run slower than normal? Or does your computer explode and blow up?

geofelt · Sep 13, 2014

Some parts may not work, particularly your graphics card.

A cheap psu lacks sufficient protective circuitry. If it gets overloaded, it may fail and destroy what it is connected to.

VincentP · Sep 13, 2014

A good PSU will cut out and the PC will power down.
A bad PSU may fail with the smell of burning electronics and never power on again, possibly taking other components with it.

Guest · Sep 14, 2014

VincentP :

Does my power supply have that power off feature? Would my power supply be considered good?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006BCKDGW/ref=twister_B00ESVCGPO

Rayven2 · Sep 14, 2014

It really comes down to what kind of system you have and what your planning to do, if you plan on using even a slightly higher end graphics card I'd recommend a higher watt PSU.

VincentP · Sep 14, 2014

Yes, this is a good quality supply.
This unit is rated at 37A on the +12V rail. This is suitable with an R9 270X or GTX 760 in a typical system.

Guest · Sep 14, 2014

VincentP :

Yes, this is a good quality supply.
This unit is rated at 37A on the +12V rail. This is suitable with an R9 270X or GTX 760 in a typical system.

Is my PSU powerful enough to power a Radeon HD 6970 and an overclocked Pentium G3258?

cst1992 · Sep 14, 2014

Want to clear a misconception - for a 500W PSU, a system will never draw 500W at idle(Especially given today's graphics cards and Haswell CPUs), to draw that kind of power at idle, you need over 60 graphics cards installed in your system.

allanitomwesh · Sep 14, 2014

Your PSU is as powerful as it needs to be depending n what your system requires. Honestly I don't think you can overclock the pentium enough to trouble it,unless you really crank up the GPU with it. Even then,you'd have to be benchmarking to make it shut down,I'd say hovering at about 4-something watts.

VincentP · Sep 14, 2014

With the graphics card and CPU running at stock speeds, your power supply is ok.
Overclocking the CPU will cause current draw over 80% of rated load on the +12V rail.
This will likely work too, but may reduce the life span of your power supply and it will certainly be noisy when the system is fully loaded.

I don't know why cst1992 is writing able idle power. Obviously you have to specify a power supply for maximum draw on the system. It is no good if your system works at idle and then dies when you try to start a game.

Your CPU is dual core. There will be times when it limits your frame rates. If you are going to try and overclock it, take it in small steps and ensure you have good cooling.

If you are interested in the maximum draw on your system, it will be up to 250W for the graphics card, 53W for the CPU at stock speeds and about 40W for other components, for a total of 343W.
This will draw about 28.5A on the 12V rail. 28.5 / 37 = 77% which is OK.

Overclocking the CPU, particularly if you raise the voltage, will cause it to use more power. If this is say 80W for the overclocked CPU, then the total is now 370W.
This will draw about 30.5A on the +12V rail. 30.5 / 37 = 82%, still within specified limits but pushing the power supply harder.

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