Thanks for all of your replies so far...I'll admit 28a did seem
rediculous to me, but that's what the specs APPEARED to have said. I'll
include a direct quote. "Power supplies with 450-Watt capacity and 30A
current on 12V rail is recommended for single...product."
They're trying to cover all bases by being conservatively
high. Around 24A is plenty in a decent PSU unless you're a
mad overclocker (or more than one CPU, more than one
high-end video card).
Does that mean 30a for the whole system (HDDs, CPU, etc)? (assuming
that everything else in the system won't take the amps above 27a or
so--to give a 10% leeway)
Most of the time a system peaking above 20A won't be
anywhere near 90% of that value. You'd have to have a game
where it put a fairly even load on both CPU and video, but
yes, their figure would have to be for the whole system and
it's just a generic guidline as they can't know if you had
some other need for a lot of 12V current such as a lot of
hard drives, a peltier, etc.
Now, I've been looking at other power supplies and have found one that
outputs very close to 38a on the 12v line with one rail (lots of good
reviews for this), and one that has 2 12v that output 18a and 19a
respectively.
You mean you found some that claim it.
Evaluate the brand first, not the label. Perhaps you have
but you make no mention of it.
Which one do you guys recommend?
That you stop trying to generalize and get an answer without
providing the details of what parts you have. Do not
randomly pick a number on a label, unless you just feel like
overpaying and then having some assurance you have more
power than you need (which can even then be a problem with
some generic PSU).
