ATX power supplies with 750 watts in the test: enough reserves for thick graphics cards

Modern PC graphics cards with high-performance GPUs calculate complex 3D graphics in cinema quality and in real-time. In addition, at the time of the first animated films, over a hundred workstations had to render for months - the electricity bill must have been considerable. Today it works more efficiently, even when high-end graphics cards such as the Nvidia RTX 3090 allow themselves 360 watts under load and sometimes scratch the 500-watt mark during power peaks. Then there are the CPU, mainboard, memory, and peripherals: upper-class gaming PCs, graphics workstations and Ethereum miners need power supplies that meet the high demand and have ample reserves for load peaks and expansions.

We subjected six high-performance ATX power supplies with a full 750 watts to a thorough test in the laboratory: Asus TUF-Gaming 750B, Corsair RMx Series RM750x, Enermax MarbleBron 750W, MSI MPG A750GF, Seasonic Focus PX 750W, and Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 750W. Each power supply unit delivers a good horsepower under full load (1 PS is around 735 watts). That is enough to supply high-performance and performance-hungry multi-core CPUs such as the Intel Core i9-10900K or the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and a top graphics card.

Compared to these large consumers, the need for RAM, SSDs and hard drives is not noticeable. Anyone who generously estimates 75 to 100 watts also has enough juice for retrofitting. But if you want to charge your smartphone or even a notebook via the power delivery function (PD) on a USB-C port of the PC, you add another 100 watts to the energy bill - this is the maximum that USB-PD can deliver.

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