My PSU is bigger than yours
Happy new year everybody!
Someone once wrote in this thread that the PSU quality has something to do with the fact that you could lower the core voltage all by getting the same OC results. So I changed from my Thermaltake ToughPower 700W back to my Seasonic SS-500HT, just by curiosity. Now, with an OC of 75% and 2 HD3870 in CF, 500 watts should be insufficient. The thing is that I'm using a little gadget called "Energy Check" (see image), which tells me the power consumption of my rig. It's 262 watts under full load, by which I mean that Orthos is doing a blend stresstest, the HD3780's are both @ 840/1316 in CF and are having fun rendering some globes in rthdribl (the Masaki Kawase tool) with 16x Multisample. Did this for an hour (remember: one hour of vacuuming heats our planet much more;) ). With the TT 700W PSU (about which I wrote here before) I had to push the cpu voltage to 1.66 for 3.68 Ghz, with the SS-500HT I could lower it to 1.500, below that the system became instable. The next thing I'm going to do is buy myself a 300W PSU (costs nothing) just for the fun, because it should be sufficient for 262W max power consumption :D . Now I'm just wondering why people (me too) buy 700 to 1KW PSUs...
Here's the Brennenstuhl PM 230:
Attachment 69931