Choosing The Right Power Supply

Choosing The Right Power Supply guide @ FiringSquad by Alan Dang:

Everyone keeps talking about watts, and it’s an understandable approach. People always talk about high-end power supplies being one reason why servers and workstations are more reliable than standard desktop machines. For example, SGI Octane workstations have 800W power supplies, even though the highly efficient MIPS architecture CPUs consume only about 17W each, the same as an x86 notebook chip.

But this is the wrong way to pick out your power supply. You first need to decide what the rest of your system will look like, and figure out how much power that takes. Then you can buy a power supply that meets your budget. Sounds simple, but there’s one little secret…”