What the heck does a PS have to do with it?

Today I bought a new power supply for my computer. There was nothing wrong with my old one except it is a little undersize for what I want to do in the near future. I'd like to get a new graphics card soon and have been looking at the nVidia 9800GTS so I can try out SLI (possibly using my LCD HDTV as one monitor) and I know a 320 watt power supply would not handle that. Well, I passed on getting the GC........couldn't bring myself to pay another $300 USD on top of the Antec 650 watt PS I purchased (just right at $100). Anyway, I installed the PS in my computer and fired it up. All went well and I must say my normally quiet Lenovo desktop is even quieter! I launched GIMP and went through a few filters that involve huge calculations and heavy rendering to just to see if things were working as normal.......they were. In fact doing a fairly complicated texture I've made and mapping it a cylinder (which normally takes about 10 mins to complete) only took maybe 3 mins!! I launched SL just on a whim to see if anything changed there too.........it did!!! Not only did SL launch faster by about 50% everything rezzed faster too (this is my normal landing point at my house 600 meters high). I did the performance monitor thing in Windows Device Manager........my CPU usage was 16% compared to the normal 20%. My RAM usage was 42% compared to the normal 50 - 55%.

I'm not complaing at all, but if anyone knows why a larger PS would increase performance that much I would love to know.

Thanks.

The entrance of electrical noise and outside interference from an inferior power supply into your mobo can make a world of difference, along with poorly regulated voltages going to your CPU and memory. Having a bad case of these factors and indeed cause all sorta of inexplicable issues, including poor performance and random unknown crashes.

FWIW, best I know a $100 level PS isn't really going to run much in the way of high perf graphics cards. My C2D 6600 and nVidia 8800GTS (old gen 640mb), plus 3 HD's eat my Corsair 620w power supplies lunch, and it wasn't cheap. To go SLI or upgrade I will have to go bigger, but it's rock solid stable as it is now. I can get 8 hours outta SL cranked out in options without trouble.

My motto on power supplies is, if it it doesn't break your arm trying to pick it up, has a flat grey finish, less than 2 fans, and didn't hurt your wallet, I don't touch it. xD

I'm pretty sure my new PS will handle what I want to do. The GC is only acking for 350 watts. I have only one HD, and one extra case fan. Sorry, I believe in overkill on electronics.......but I won't bring out a nuke when a bunker buster will more than do the job.

wow, more good info. It does seem to make sense and have a rational behind it. I'd never looked to the quality of a PS for more than power rating. I'll never look at them the same now. The alternative is to throw away money on a great mobo, kickass GC, quad core CPUs, multiple gigabytes or ram and fail utterly in the Q of the power feeding it all.

Good power supply? Hell Yah.

Heh.. a upgrade to ya power supply will do most systems better even the stock wally world ones...they put th ebare min into them. allways good to have some breathing room with them, possibly just for upgrades or for comfort,your choice.. it would also depend on the amount of fans, HD's, cpu wattage, ram, GC/s, etc.. most people not aiming high end wont have a problem with a mid range powersuppy, its the high end/ overclockers that need more power,lol.. And u can allways use the following link to get a pretty good idea on what u might need too


http://support.asus.com/PowerSupplyCalculator/PSCalculator.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

According to that calculator I'm 200 watts to the good...........worse case.

Heh.. well im about 50watts under what i should be now.. guess i know where my next upgrade is...going for a 1000watts plus next time at 700 now..

if i could go back and tell myself this hobby of mine was gonna cost me so much i would do myself the favor but to late, knee deep allready,lol

my 350 watt rms power supply just recently went out. i replaced it with a POS compusa brand 400 watt

now this thing is only putting out 10 amps on the 12v rail ~120 watts

and my machine has never been slower

why?

video card and cpu

i can unplug the power from my video card right now and it wouldnt make a bit of difference cause its not getting enugh jucice

same with my cpu

ever hear of "cool n quiet" or "centreno" same thing except they are controlled for when your not doing anything intense, so imagine jamming you computer into centreno mode for its entire life, and then "pluggin it into the wall"

now since this is a pretty protected ps its not going to allow wattage outside of a certain range, doesnt mean its not gonna burn up (i expect 6 weeks) but its making my 1.9ghz computer bench like my 866mhz p3

if i was u i would just shut it off.. lackof to much pwr can dmg your comp.. should get u another PSU.. at least with one that gots 24 amps on the 12v rail.. makes a big difference reguardless of what your wattage is..they trick u like that,lol. i dont care what they say u can buy u a good 600-700 watt psu for 100 usd..it doesnt need to hurt your wallet to be good.. just check the stats and reviews..and the 600-700 watt system is good for any mid range system..and im one to talk now too with my underpowerd system.. but i just unhooked my extra usb devices and DvD drive and HD..now im right on the dot..give or take

My 650 watt Antec cost me a little over $100 USD yesterday. It wasn't even on sale either.

Thinking back now I guess I was overloading my old PS if that calculator is correct. I'm 200 watts to the good right now and I haven't added or subtracted any hardware devices since installing the PS yesterday. The old one was 320 watts............I was overloading it by 130 watts. That might explain the unexpected (but greatly appreciated) performance boost I saw last evening.

Yup.. lol..it will help alot and im guessing the 320 psu was a stock one too huh.. and yup find some good ones at that price range unless your going BIG

again is that 320 watts max or rms

cause 320 watts max means its only gonna produce 160 watts, which isnt enough to power an apple][

and yea 100 bucks for a 650 RMS power supply is about right, maby 80 for a crappy maxed out one

i bought this same supply for a biuld i recently did (and it was on sale for 78 bucks), i think it was doing 20 amps on the 12v * 3 rails

RMS is great 20*12 *3 = 720w+ ~50% overload tolerance for the max

in other words, your good

Centrino and Cool n Quiet are two very different things.

Cool n Quiet is AMD's equivalent of Intel's Speedstep. It slows the CPU down when it's not being used, thus reducing power consumption and lowing temperatures.

Centrino is a CPU, chipset, wireless card combination. All Centrino branded laptops must contain a Centrino approved CPU, Centrino approved chipset, and Centrino approved wireless card. Centrino CPU's do support Speedstep, but the computers themselves have no performance inhibiting features.

In regard to the "I installed a new PSU and my computer is faster!" thing, that's bogus. If your computer isn't getting enough power, it'll crash. Installing a new PSU gives you more power to play with, but your computer won't use the extra power unless you install more hardware in it.

Not sure I'd just declare it bogus.

Peggy, was there a lot of dust and such to clean up when you swapped power supplies or did you maybe notice that the fan on the old PS was flakey? It could be that there was a heat problem and the CPU was thermal throttling - slowing itself down because it thought it was too warm.

so your telling me that my system on boot with old nvidia drivers doesnt pop up a window telling me directly

"your video card and or cpu is not getting enough power and has been set to a reduced state to prevent damage to your system, and performance will not be as expected, please check your power connections before proceeding"

cause i swear it does

Some GPU's can run in a reduced power state. If this is the case, then you are under powered and that is different than upgrading the PSU for a performance boost. Other components are not capable of this, however. CPU's, HDD's, optical drives, NIC's, chipsets, etc, will fail if they do not receive proper power.

Most GPU's, however, cannot do this and the computer will crash sporadically in underpowered conditions.

No on all counts. I clean my case inside about every two or three weeks. All my fans work.......I check them regularly (usually when I have th sides off to clean). As I said in the original post that started this thread there was nothing wrong wtih the old PS.......in fact it's pretty new (bought this computer just before last Christmas). My computer actually is quite fast.......been that way from day one. All I noticed right off the bat was that SL launched quicker..........would normally take about one minute to get to my log in screen and that time is roughly halved now. I use GIMP for textures I make to upload to SL. There is one filter that I know is very heavy on the calculations and image rendering...........it's the map to a cylinder. I have one texture I made a while back that consistantly took almost 10 miniums to be mapped to a cylinder............I tried it just to see if my CPU temps climbed (they did........by 1 degree celsius) but was almost flabbergasted when the filter ran it's course in about 3 minutes. That's when I thought I'd test out SL and see if any increase in performance was there too. And what I found was what I stated in my first post.

Now if some geek says it's bogus then I suppose he's calling me a liar. I don't like it but hey, he can think as he pleases. I was not expecting an increase in performance with a new PS..............hence the title to my thread. I don't understand why, but I know it is what I said. Take it for what it's worth. I got the PS for a future graphics card upgrade which I know my old PS would not handle well. I did not get the PS for increased performance. It's the graphics card I'm looking at that I expect to see better performance. The PS is just a requirement to have that card

Plus, I've found that often many of these so called experts that appear to know it all, in actuality know no more than I do..............and I'm far from an expert.

I'm editing to add.........I almost never crash in SL. And haven't since I got away from ATI graphics cards. That's been about two years now.

sigh ... so what if the computer came with an underated power supply, and the users has just been in this reduced state the entire time, putting a better one in amazingly lets the system now reach full force

the thread didnt say "hey everyone go out and buy a new power supply for 60 extra fps" it was a question wondering why

and what is proper power for a nic, i can run one off of a battery, hard drives and optical drives only require 12v for the motors, whos to say they wernt running at 6000 rpm instead of 7200, the controler board runs off of 5v and is a totally different system, which leaves the cpu, well nvidia's chipsets obiously can run a cpu with less than enough power in a reduced state so can most via, intels, amds, s3's, sis ect

thats the entire point behind things like cool n quiet, you can dynamicly ajust the clock rate to reduce power consumpton, weather its becuase its in a idol state,your battery is getting low, or your power supply is crap

Well, the computer wouldn't come with an underpowered PSU. It'd be user error in installing components that the existing PSU is unable to support.

NIC's use a couple of watt's, modern 7200RPM HDD's use 5 or 6 watts when seeking. And logic says that the drive wasn't spinning at 6000RPM. Let's assume for a moment that the drive even operated in a reduced power state where the servo didn't get enough power, and spun the platers at 6000RPM. You'd corrupt your whole disk because the controller assumes 7200RPM (for 7200RPM drives). Western Digital is the only company at the moment that makes variable speed drives, and it's a power saving feature (I know what you're going to say, and no, it doesn't mean they spin slower if there's not enough power available). If a HDD is not recieving a steady supply of power, then it will cease to function. Not necessarily die, but it won't work.

You seem to have completely missed the point of CPU and chipset low power modes. The point of them isn't to keep the CPU and chipset operating in the absence of adequate power. The point is to conserve power in order to lighten the computers load on the grid, reduce carbon emissions, and reduce your electric bill. AMD and Intel CPU's increase their speed on demand. So let's assume we had a low power condition, and you somehow managed to boot the PC without it crashing. The instant that you do anything that loads the CPU past maybe 20%, the clock speed will go up (depending on the chipset, and the CPU, it might be as simple as the CPU stepping up its vcore and multiplier, or the FSB speed could also rise). As clock speed rises, power requirements rise. In this example, there is just barely enough power to run the PC in a power saving state, but not enough once the CPU comes out of this state (this isn't realistic, but it makes enough sense for this example. A loaded PC can consume between 30 watts and infinity watts more than an idle PC), so the instant a load is applied, power consumption rises beyond what the PSU can supply. As load increases on the rails, efficiency falls, PSU temps rise, and output on all rails falls, causing a crash. The HDD and GPU and CPU won't slow down, you crash. Probably a random stop error, that's generally what happens with low power conditions (I've troubleshot enough of them to know how much of a pain it is).

tl;dr: CPU power management isn't to deal with low power conditions. CPU power management is to save power. It won't stop the CPU from running full steam ahead on a low battery or overloaded PSU. HDD's don't slow down, they can't, except for certain Western Digital models.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record, voltage isn't a measure of current draw. Saying "It pulls 12v, that's nothing" means nothing. Video cards pull 12v from the molex aux plug, and they can consume enough power to light up several incandescent light bulbs.

I did, indeed add a component to my computer.......even before I plugged it in and turned it on for the first time. It was a GeForce 8600GT (256 megs). I read the requirements for the card..........it said a minimum of a 300 watt power supply. The one that came with the computer was (actually still is since I have stored away) 320 watts. I had no problems with either the video card or power supply. I monitored my CPU and motheboard temps and for the most part the temps stayed in the 45 to 50 degree C range with occassional jumps to 60 under heavy load (such as GIMP and SL.......even both at the same time). But never anything frieghtening. My computer is very fast.......always was. I don't see it faster with the new PS. Just SL launching faster for some reason and that one texture mapping to a cylinder thing. I know there has been an increase in performance..........the only thing that changed was a larger (and better) PS. I just wanted to know why that would happen............I never expected it.

Seems you are arguing symantics about the ins and outs of power supplies. I can follow most of what you are saying...........but I highly recent the implication that I'm lying about what I have experienced since Saturday when I installed the PS. Plus, I don't believe you when you say the power consumption of a video card will light several incandescent light bulbs......unless you are talking about little 4 watt night lights. And at 12 volts what is the wattage for those anyway? Get real.

Graphics cards carry a big power drain.........if they are supped up overclocked monster cards. This is just an off the shelf nVidia 8600GT. Even the one i'm looking at is not going to consume twice this one.

Now, if you can tell me why I experienced the increased performance you will have answered my question. So far all you've done is doubted my contention.....and tried to baffle me with BS.

I don't suspect that you're lying. We don't have before and after numbers to compare, so we're going off of a "It feels faster" system. I don't think that you're purposely telling us things that you know to be wrong, and maybe something has sped up with your new PSU. But there's no technical reason why the computer would be faster after adding another power supply.

Indeed, the 8600GT does not draw tons of power. I'm looking at a review right now where they took an 8600GT's power draw from the wall, and it was 188 watts. But that's not true of all video cards. An 8800GTX in the same system pulled 326 watts when loaded. A standard lightbulb pulls 60 watts, so assuming 260 watts for the 8800GTX (which is reasonable), it'd light 4 bulbs with a bit to spare.

Video cards pull more than 12 volts. They're getting power from the motherboard, and some of the higher end cards even contain two aux connectors. But as for wattage from the molex connector, let's do the math. We'll assume 16 amps on the 12v and 5v rails (although it's not uncommon for PSU's to be able to push 20+ amps over the various rails), which nets us 192 watts on the 12v rail, and 80 watts on the 5v rail, meaning a card can pull 272 watts per molex plug, and some cards use two. That's not counting the motherboard power.

For reference purposes, the formula for getting watts when you know voltage and amperage is: volts * amps = watts

And if I'm BSing you on something, please point it out so I can fix it. As far as I'm aware, I haven't posted any BS (nor would it help anybody, so it'd be odd for me to knowingly post any).

ok go get an emachines with a 100 watt power supply and a geforce 8 in it and tell me its adequate from the oem

hard drives dont have to run at full speed to operate, they just need to run at a constant speed, dynamicaly varible and just slower are 2 different things

and you totally missed my point about the cpu's, they are designed to operate at lower speeds = lower wattage, who cares if its stuck in that mode or if its doing it on the fly its the same principal, just like my old nvidia chipset bitching about not having enough power, it reduced my clock speed, period it does it, it did it, and i will not be able to run this chip at 1.9ghz untill i get a better ps

and video cards dont pull more than 12 volts, yes its true they have mutiple voltages but you cant add a +5 and a + 12 and a + 3 and get 20v, it uses those 3 voltages for 3 reasons and they are 3 separate rails in the ps

your gpu might be using 160 watts at 12v but the memory might only be pulling 50 watts at 5 volts and the bus io 1 watt on @ 3v

its like saying " i got 50,000 mile tires on my car so i dont have to change the oil for that long either"

You can't. emachines won't offer a machine with a 100 watt PSU and give you the option to get a preinstalled GeForce 8xxx series. It'd come with an Intel GPU (I've got a computer with a 100 watt PSU).

The HDD will fail to start and operate. The platters won't spin slower in low power conditions. They don't work like that.

They are indeed designed to run at slower speeds to consume less power, but they function on an "on demand" system, where as demand increases, speed increases, therefore, power consumption increases. If the power supply cannot supply steady/adequate power as the processor ramps up, instability results.

There are graphics cards that pull 250+ watts, and they have to get it from somewhere.

That's a lot of power for the memory.

Not really.

I didn't start this thread to get an argument going. The discussion really was quite good and I learned some things too. I still don't know why I saw the increased performance for sure.....though I have gotten an idea as to why it might have happened. I'm thinking the reason is that I was, in fact, overloading my old PS with the addition of the 8600GT card when I bought this machine. I'm using that calculator someone posted to base my thoughts on. I did the calculation using my current components (this new 650 watt PS). I found that I'm using right at 400 watts right now.......and before I was using the same wattage but only a 320 watt PS. That would put me 80 watts over what the PS could handle effectively. Hence, though my computer performed quite well with that setup (for how long, only heaven knows ), it was not performing at a level it is capable of doing. Now, it seems, it is......so maybe that's what I saw.

Moral of the story......nVidia said my card would work fine as long as I had a 300 watt PS. That depends, huh?

Thanks for all the input. And I'm apologizing for my flare up last night.

nVidia gets their wattage requirement from the card in an average system. In other words, in an average, modern system with an 8600GT, the load on the PSU will be under 300 watts when the computer is fully loaded with an application that maxes out the system.

Of course, if you're running an above average system, that load increases.