How to meassure wattage in your desktop pc?

[jp2552]

Im building a gaming rig that consist of a cooler master storm trooper case, NZXT HALE 90 850 watt psu, 2 radeon 7850 gpu's, amd FX8150, 4 x4 GB CORSAIR Vengence 1866, Asus crosshair V motherboard, Corsair H100 cpu cooler, Corsair GT solid state, asus optical drive 24x dvd, 320GB western digital caviar green and Asus Xonar phoebus soundcard. I also plan on overclocking my GPU and CPU Not too the extreme but better then stock. First of i would like to know if my NZXT 850W PSU could handle the gear i have. My second question is how can i moniter how many watts my computer is consuming in the operating system. Leets say im only using 700 watts how would i find that out?

 

[MU_Engineer]

Im building a gaming rig that consist of a cooler master storm trooper case, NZXT HALE 90 850 watt psu, 2 radeon 7850 gpu's, amd FX8150, 4 x4 GB CORSAIR Vengence 1866, Asus crosshair V motherboard, Corsair H100 cpu cooler, Corsair GT solid state, asus optical drive 24x dvd, 320GB western digital caviar green and Asus Xonar phoebus soundcard. I also plan on overclocking my GPU and CPU Not too the extreme but better then stock. First of i would like to know if my NZXT 850W PSU could handle the gear i have. My second question is how can i moniter how many watts my computer is consuming in the operating system. Leets say im only using 700 watts how would i find that out?

The easiest way to find out exactly how many watts your computer uses is to get a watt meter (such as the Kill-A-Watt). Plug the watt meter into the power strip, then plug the computer into the watt meter and watch the display on the meter. Easy as that.

 

[badger578]

For the US: http://www.amazon.com/WANF-Electricity-Energy-Usage-Socket/dp/B0041YS15W

For UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plug-In-Power-and-Energy-Monitor/dp/B000Q7PJGW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344353998&sr=8-2

 

[larkspur]

The NZXT will have no trouble at all with your rig, it's a great PSU: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story5&reid=199

For the 2nd question: For all that expensive gear in there you should get yourself a UPS. I use an older model APC SUA1500. It has software (including logging) that tells me my current and historical power draw in watts from within Windows. I can also just look over at the unit to see what the current power draw is.

A cheaper (but otherwise worthless) option would be to use one of those things called a "Kill-a-Watt". It doesn't interface with the computer so it wouldn't tell you anything in Windows. You plug it into the wall and then plug your computer into it. It will tell you what the draw is but you have to remember to estimate and subtract for your PSU's inefficiency if you want to know what the components themselves are drawing.

And I tried really hard to not say anything about your CPU, but I failed: You should get a 2500k or a 3570k, forget that chip for gaming and especially for XFire. I'm not saying it won't work - but the 2500k and 3570k are much better for gaming.