Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
I over-simplified to make a point, which you reinforce here. My computer in 1995 had a 150W power supply. Computers these days typically have 450W power supplies or larger. My current PC has a 1200W power supply, which was unheard of back in the day. Overall, computers have grown more power hungry as efficiency has improved.
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Perhaps you are confused here. The power supply rating is the maximum the power supply can provide, not what it is continuously providing. So you certainly can get into situations where you draw the full 1200 watts from your power supply - arc welding, anyone? Maybe you have a couple of high-end NVidia graphics cards, and are playing a 3D game, or (if you are me) are running some seismic tomography code. But when you pause that, and go do something like web browsing, your power consumption falls to a small fraction of that max.
On the other end of the scale, you have your notebooks (which I think may now outsell desktop units) that're nearly as capable but optimized for low power consumption. I work mostly off my notebook, booting up the desktop only for the occasional compute-intensive session (the last such was sometime in early June), and in my usual web browser & text editor mode that draws just 17 watts.