A few months back before the GeForce 8800 series hit the shelves, any 800 watt
or higher power supplies were very often a complete overkill of wattage. Very
few machines had enough components and peripherals running to require the need
for that kind of power. And even then, very few machines out there had a couple
Geforce 7950s on top of more than 6 hard drives. The common machines which could
be spotted at LAN parties all typically had something that required wattage in
the area of 450 to 550 watts. Still, there were some 700 to 850 watt power
supplies in those machines.
Even today, there really isn't much of a need to require the use of a power
supply over 700 watts for the average user. Intel's latest LAN party here in the
Northwest had about 250 machines and more of which had bigger power supplies compared to a year ago. About 1 out
of 8 computers had video cards in SLI with 3 to 5 hard drives which still didn't
quite require the more powerful power supplies. However, about half of those had the
top rated graphics cards in SLI which do need more watts with all
the extra hard drives, dual core processors, lights, gizmos, and gadgets. Still,
maybe 5 machines there required more than 900 watts due to the amount of hard
drives installed which was some where around 6 to 8 on top of the 8800 GTX cards
in SLI.
Now that DX10 graphics cards, quad core processors, power hungry overclocking
dream motherboards, and ample RAID systems are here, the need for power supplies
greater than 700 watts is finally more realistic for gamers and enthusiasts. Any
1000 watt PSUs are typically more than the standard SLI system requires. Then again,
the newest extreme user is looking for their money's worth by buying big now in
hopes of saving some cash later when more power hungry components reach the
market. Overclocking is so much easier on the upper end model motherboards which
means more and more people are looking to squeeze more bang for buck out of
their system. Since this is the current state of affairs, Tagan Technology sent
us their
GuardianX Silver Power 1000W Power Supply for purpose of powering any
system for the years to come.