She has'ne got the power Cap'n!

Technology has a horrible habit of going wrong every now and again. User error??? RTFM!

I came back from a weekend away last Tuesday and turned on Old Faithful (the PC, not the wife) only to have sparks fly and a loud bang, followed by a nasty smell (I'm still talking about the PC here).

It would seem it was my PC's power supply which had finally bit the dust (I say finally like I was expecting it, but in truth I'm not sure I was).

When I tried to work out what had caused it, I realised that I had possibly over-loaded the wattage usage for it. It was a 380W power supply, and I think (by using an online calculator e.g. this one) that I was using around 370W or so (minus USB attached devices).

Now I'm not the biggest tree hugger out there, but I thought 380W was quite a bit of power to be using. Obviously it won't always be using that amount (under normal/idle usage), but under full load (i.e. playing an intensive game) it could well be using that.

I thought that with the new Intel C2D or C2Q CPUs etc. the power draw of modern PCs was supposed to be pretty low. Admittedly I also have 4 hard drives & 2 DVD drives in there, but that's not the point ;o)
It seems the graphics cards these days are the biggest power hungry components out there. Even the (relatively) old one that I have uses around 150W (under full load).

Thankfully most of the time I tend to use my laptop for the usual tasks (email/web etc. etc.) which even when charging only uses up to 90W, so a much more eco-friendly way to 'compute'.

I dread to think how much the 'leccy bills are for those guys using the 1000+ watt power supplies who are gaming for whole weekends etc.