James Sweet wrote:

There's a lot of wattage inflation these days,

True.

following the stereo
equipment makers in the 80s. The fact of the matter is that if you have
a *quality* 300 or 350W power supply, it should run just about anything
you can fit in the computer. I've measured a number of computers with a
power analyzer and I have yet to see one which draws more than 250W from
the wall under full load, most typical single CPU computers are down
around 160-180W even with multiple hard drives.

But I don't belive that 250 W drawn from the mains is a likely maximum now.

I was doing some calculuations the other day based on a pair of Opterons.
According to AMD, they are about 100 W each. A very mediocre graphics card is
probably 30 W. Disks take more when they spin up.

350 W is probably adequate for most things I would agree. My main PC (I don't
use PCs much) has a 235 W power supply in it, but a pair of 450 MHz Pentiums and
a 10,000 rpm SCSI disk. That seems to be OK

A more elegant solution if there are multiple disks might be to build a timer
that delays the starts on them, as the power when running is probalby only half
that when starting.

Personally, I think I'd just rather buy a bigger psu - they are not that
expensive now.


--
Dave K MCSE.

MCSE = Minefield Consultant and Solitaire Expert.

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@domain. Hitting reply will work
for a couple of months only. Later set it manually.