Everyday my inbox is filled with various questions from readers. However recently the majority of these questions have been power supply related and the subject is always about how much power is enough. Many readers are starting to ask if 700 watt and 800 watt units will be enough, which is crazy given that most powerful gaming systems need no more than 600 watts...

Are you currently thinking of building an SLI enabled Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX gaming system with an Intel quad-core processor and a couple of hard drives in RAID? Well if you are then you need a 1000 watt power supply right? Wrong, but how can this be wrong with so many 1000 watt power supplies becoming available! In fact you don’t even need an 850 or 800 watt power supply to safely operate such a system. After recently building this exact system we discovered that the maximum power demand created by this configuration was just 530 watts.