Is it safe to use a higher wattage power
supply in my computer, everyone, Leo Notenboom here
for Askleo.com let's dive right into the question.
"I want to upgrade my current case that has
a 300 watt due to a nicer looking case, but it has a 520 watt PSU.
Is it OK?
And how does the W difference influence PC operations?"
There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about what
the wattage rating on a power supply really means.
The short answer for your specific scenario is you'll be fine.
It's always fine to have a power supply installed in your machine
that has a higher wattage rating than your machine actually needs.
Clearly, if your machine has been working
on three hundred watts, having 500 available, not a big deal.
You may not use the 500, but your machine will work just fine.
In your case. You're replacing the entire case,
so who knows what the actual power requirements are going to be.
But again, going from 300 to 500, not an issue.
So we need to talk about what it means, what what's actually means.
It's a measure of power.
Now, power supplies are measured in terms
of the amount of power that they are capable of supplying.
So your three hundred watt power supply is
capable of supplying, well, 300 watts of power.
That doesn't mean it's going to force 300 watts of power onto your computer.
It just means that it's there.
It's like having a ten gallon tank of water and a spigot.
If you replace that 10 gallons with 20
gallons, the spigot just works the way that it works.
It takes the amount of water that it needs or that is allowed through the spigot
without being affected by how much water is behind it.
Same kind of thing with respect to power supplies.
If it's got more power than you need, great.
It's power that's available.
But it is not something that is going to adversely impact your system because
it's not going to force that power on your system.
Another way to look at it, it's very common for a machine to use much
less power than is provided by the power supply.
So, for example, the machine I'm looking at right now, I believe it has a 600 watt
power supply, but it's probably only using a couple hundred watts.
The power supply is capable of supplying more,
but it's only going to supply the amount that's actually needed to run the machine.
In my case, probably 200 watts is just fine.
If I start exercising my machine more extensively, like I say,
I do something that is very computationally intense so that the CPU is
working very, very hard, or I'm doing something that is exercising
the disks and they're using more power, then yeah, the power usage might go up.
My machine might, instead of requiring 200 watts, maybe go to 300 or 400.
But my 600 watt power supply is just going
to be sitting there supplying the power that's requested up to its 600 watt limit.
So it really boils down to what does your machine need?
That's a minimum.
We know, as I said earlier,
your machine works well with three hundred watt power supply.
The fact that you give it more,
that you have given the ability to have more in the form of a 500 watt power
supply, not an issue, just not an issue, your computer will use what it uses.
In the past, it didn't use more than three hundred, so it's not going to use more
than three hundred regardless of the power supply that you attached to it.
Now, there are times when you do want to upgrade.
There are times when you do want
to actually replace a lower power supply with a larger one.
And that's when you've actually changed the hardware.
If you install more hard disks, your computer will need more power.
If you've added more add in boards,
more pieces of hardware that themselves are going to require more power.
Maybe you've upgraded your video card,
maybe you've added an interface to your machine.
Maybe you've added some other processing circuit board to the PC that in turn
causes it to require more power to operate.
Then, yeah, it's possible your machine
could require more than three hundred watts,
but it's the machine's requirement that drives what kind of a power supply
you want to put in, not the power supply itself.
So once again, you've got 300 watts and all of a sudden you've added hardware
so that your machine now requires more than 300 watts.
It's time to get a bigger power supply, but that's all it really boils down to.
Now, one of the things that I mentioned,
like on my machine here, I've got a 600 watt power supply.
I think I could be wrong.
But the point is, I've got a fairly large power supply.
Even though I'm not using all that power, why would I do that?
I call it future proofing because at some point I will add more ram to this machine.
At some point I may add more hard disks to this machine.
At some point I may add some of those
circuit boards to this machine at that point.
This machine is going to require more power.
So if I've already got a larger power
supply in place, that's something that I won't have to upgrade.
That larger power supply will just rise to the occasion and supply the power
that my system needs up to whatever my power suppliers rate it out.
So that's what I call future proofing.
And it is one reason to make sure your
machine has a good power supply when you get it.
In the first case,
there are two other things about power
supplies that I think are at least worth mentioning.
One is that if you do replace just a power supply and not the entire case,
power supplies have different sizes and I mean physical sizes.
They are boxes with wires that come out.
That box has to be the right size to fit inside of your computer.
So make sure that that matches.
And like I said, they have different wires that come out of them.
Make sure that whatever replacement power supply you're considering has
the connections, has the wires coming out of it that match whatever it is your
motherboard or your computer is going to need in total.
Those are the important things.
Make sure your power supply is physically the right size,
has the connections that it needs to connect to your computer,
and then has a wattage rating that is bigger than what your computer needs.
And if you're just doing a straight
replacement, bigger than whatever the existing power
supply happened to be, hope that's helpful.
I hope that makes things a little bit less
confusing for updates, for related links, for comments.
If you have more questions and so forth, visit askleo.com/2873.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.