I don't know if the rest is high or low but the rest of the equipment is ~4years old
Conversation
Are you overclocking anything? Which video card is it? I suspect you can get by with 650W no problem given what you've said, though.
1
You also can cause low-voltage burnout by running under the wattage.
1
Well think of Ohm's Law: I=V/R
R (resistance) isn't going to change, right? You're not going to change your system. So if the current is too low the voltage will be higher; if the voltage is too low the current will be higher.
1
so being under volted but still having a complete circuit can result in damage to the components. it might not - hard drives pull a lot of juice so that number is generally higher than it needs to be on purpose. just a risk.
1
It's not quite that simple because the power supply is designed to adjust its output to keep voltages constant under different current draws, but yes, if it can't keep up with demand then voltages will drop, and that's not ideal long term.
1
It's a fairly high quality PSU and would likely cut power long before anything unsafe.
650W is definitely enough. They're covering themselves in case someone uses it with a 16+ core overclocked CPU and complains that it blew out their under-capacity sketchy PSU which this isn't.
2
2
Unless there are 20x HDDs or something crazy like that it's definitely enough. You'd probably want to bump up to 850W if you had something like a Ryzen 9 5950X (16 core) that you were going to overclock. Even with that CPU, it would be enough if you weren't overclocking it.
1
Her card draws 310W, but I'm pretty sure from talking to her that the rest of her system never draws more than maybe 200W under severe load, so yeah. I would update the PSU if it were me, because it's a nice GPU, but then I run a 1200W PSU because I overbuild everything. :)
2
It's worth updating the PSU if it's going to be used under load for many hours a day to save money on electricity bills. I wouldn't bother otherwise.
PSUs are most efficient near 50% load. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus#E is efficiency standard although the actual numbers can be better.
