Overpowered PSU?

[Bert22]

Out of curiosity I ventured to measure the power requirements of my desktop system with the following specs: (Asus P5G41T-M LX LGA 775, Pentium E6600, 2 sticks of DDR3 1333, 1Gb Sapphire HD 5450, 320Gb WD Caviar Blue SATA HDD, 1 PCIe USB 3.0 Card, LG 24X DVD Writer, 4 USB devices, 1 stock CPU fan, 1 80mm exhaust LED fan & Huntkey Max 500W 80+ PSU) By using the PSU calculator of Thermaltake (extreme.outervision.com), the result is: 186W min PSU wattage & 236W recommended PSU wattage. The MSI PSU utility calculated the whole system at 117W peak load! PSU efficiency starts to kick-in at 20% load, around 100W. I use my unit mostly by web-surfing, e-mail & word processing which require lesser power. Do I have an "over-powered" unit? or does it harm the motherboard? Does the wasted extra wattage available make my system inefficient? Any advice shall be appreciated. Thank you..

[Guest]

IMHO. it is better to have more power than just marginally meeting the requirements. This gives you room to grow/upgrade if necessary. You should be fine "as-is" IMHO.

[Guest2]

Your 500W power supply doesn't put out 500 watts all the time. That is just the maximum it is capable of. Your computer system will only draw whatever current it needs. If your system only needs 150 watts, then your PSU will will loaf along at 150 watts and draw less current from your wall socket. If and when your system needs more power your PSU will draw more current from your wall socket and give the system what it draws up to a MAX of 500 watts. You are better off having a bigger power supply than you need. It will run cooler and last longer than if you had a smaller unit running at max wattage all the time.