Re:Usability of Old Computers
by userbinator on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:04AM
(#37639571)
I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era.
...and the vast majority of those PSUs were cheap off-brand units actually rated in unrealistic "Chinese watts", with 150-200 being all they could honestly deliver for anything short of brief spikes.
I'd say that 250-350 watt PSUs were very common in white-box/home-built PCs in the P4/Athlon XP era.
400W and above, yes, that was much less common. I can recall at that point in time, Enermax made their name selling some of the largest PSUs on the mainstream market, and that line tended to be like 450-600W units.
I do sort of agree, it's almost completely about GPUs these days. The spinning rust is now low-power flash. A top Ryzen 9 or Core i9 might top out at 150-250W, but that's not that much higher than Prescott on a bad day, and plenty of people are picking models in the <100 watt power classes. However, the idea of a 400W-by-itself GPU was completely off the field in the early 2000s.