Worth swapping in more efficient PSU?

[sswilson]

Heh... no, not going to go that far.

I like having a spare in the house (which is now the Corsair 650W), but I'm not going to be looking for a smaller PSU for the rig I've been talking about.

Running a downclocked / undervolted 5700 XT shows 120W draw (in software) , and the G3258 shows 7W (ish) so without a kill-a-watt to verify I'm assuming 20 - 30W for the board/cpu/SSD for 140-150W 24/7. For safety's sake, there's also the possibility that the vid card's settings might reset putting it into full power mode which could add an extra 100W+ draw so I'm a lot more comfortable with at least a 550W than I would be with a 400/450W.

 

[MARSTG]

Technically, max efficiency for a PSU is between 40-60 % load, so yes it would be a difference but the savings will be negligible for a single system. If you had 10, then maybe some economy of scale could kick in.

 

[gingerbee]

I didn't even think about power draw since it is so small, I think your power curve would be more telling that and age