On 15/12/12 12:27, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
My machine died the other night, reasonably gracefully, and having decided it must be the PSU I went and bought the only matx one locally in stock.
Its 300 Watt, which is what the old one was, and it works but is unbearably noisy. So I am thinking of replacing with a 200 Watt Xilence, which is reviewed in some german mag as being exceptionally quiet.
Question: will 200W be enough? Its an i3, one hard drive, no optical, no graphics card and a gigabyte main board in a mini-itx case. My intuition is that it will be just fine because this is such a minimalist setup, but I know nothing about power or how to measure what the draw is.
The other choices seem to be silverstone, but they only make them 400W +, and that is certainly over the top. There do not seem to be any fanless ones in this form factor.
It's not really all about the overall wattage, mostly you need to look at the current capacity of the +12V rails and compare to what one of the online PSU calculators say for your hardware.
Modern supplies will be more generous as to what portion of the 200W is available on the 12v rails as modern hardware hits this rail harder in proportion to the others. In the old days the CPU supplies were derived directly from the lower voltage rails.