Power Supplies, and video cards

[mabufo]

If I want to install a video card that recomends my PSU to have 400W, and I only have 300W, will that hamper my performance? What will happen? Will anything happen?

[Spellbinder]

Its for sure will "hamper" your performance if it will work at all. There no big deal to switch to 400w though.

[KoKo5oVaR]

Basically your PSU will burn, well that happened to me 3 times until i switched to a 550 W PSU

but i'm no hardware expert

[Spellbinder]

Isn't there switches on the board that gives everything the right amount?

Like a cpu only needs 3.5 to 4 volt right? Oh wait the PSU.

[Sindwiller]

I think, either Spellbinder's 'performance hamper' or Koko's 'PSU burn down' will happen...

PS. I've got 600W biatch

[von*ferret]

I used to live in a house that had rampant number of power outages. Could this affect the quality of my power supply? I feel like I lost some FPS over time and I think it might be partly due to my power supply not supplying as much power now.

[Spellbinder]

Not really for power outage, but if it has lots of it there could likely be spikes aswell and that i guess could make it work less as good as it should. But isnt there a way to check this, like in bios or somewhere?

[mabufo]

Well, I'll just run to my local tiger direct retail location and pick up some 500W power supplies once my stuff arrives...

Does anyone have any (prefferably on the cheap) 500W PSU recomendations?

[Thrik]

As far as I'm aware you're more liable to just hit a blue screen or something should your power supply be insufficient, due to the inevitable processing errors that'll occur. I haven't experienced it personally, but back when my graphics card turned out to be incompatible with my motherboard I observed that a lot of people were getting similar crashes due to the card requiring a higher voltage than most before it (it only needed 300W back then though).

I wouldn't expect you'd get FPS issues as the calculations would just fail if it's not getting enough juice, or other components in your machine would suffer/crash due to the graphics card monopolising the power.

[JamesL]

Dont scrimp money on a PSU it will only serve to make your system unstable and it will likely die 10 times faster than a decent one anyway.

Personally I use antec psu's. Not overly expensive and good quality (stable) voltage output. Less than 100 quid.

[Zacker]

First of all, the "recommended PSU power" specs on GPUs and other hardware is only how much it requires in a standard setup. This means that if the rest of your comp is energy efficient, then you might not need as much. If you got 2 harddrives, 2 memory blocks, lots of fans, etc. then you might also very well need more.

If your PSU lacks power output then several different things can happen depending on the safety measures of you hardware.

- Proper GPU's will detect when they don't get sufficient power and adjust their power consumption and performance down. You should get a notice when this happens.

- In other cases it will cause your computer to suddenly lock up or reboot, especially if the issue is unstable power and not general lack of power.

- If there is way too little power, then it won't start at all and can in rare cases damage the card.

It is unlikely that the PSU will burn down, at least not before after some time.

Regarding houses with regular power spikes and power outages, then this will in most cases be taken care of by the PSU and in bad cases it will cause a reboot/shutdown.

[BaRRaKID]

If your power supply is not powerfull enough, it wont burn, but some of the other parts of the computer may not work, for example in order for the gfx to work the dvd drive may stop working.

Buying a good PSU is the best thing you can do, they are not that expensive and are well worth the money. Off course its also a nice idea to buy a UPS to avoid burning the PSU