Why 99% of PC Power Supply Reviews Are Wrong

[disolitude]

ithis said:

I don't know what all the fuss is about power supplies. In my 15 years of being around other people's computers, building my own computers, and building computers for others, I never had trouble with the cheap power supplies I used, except for the rare failed ones (cheaply replaced), and only once did I see a massive (i.e. complete) failure of a PC which might have been a power supply thing (but not from a voltage fluctuation since the other computers form the area felt nothing, most likely a MB short circuit as I remember, not mine).
Since I never go for a "max theoretic power plus 200W" philosophy, that I see is common, I barely reached the 500W barrier recently. Who needs more for a dual core, 2 Gigs of RAM, a couple of HDDs, some random optical drive, and a good enough GPU combination anyways?

I always thought the PSU reviews are full of it. Cheap PSUs worked fine for me.

I need more than 500W easily...GTX295 graphics card power draw is below.

 

I'm thinking of upgrading to GTX470 SLI setup which will put my video card power draw at 550W (under load).