Not so long after my post about clueless game server admins, time for another comment on highly qualified would-be techies. Some people love so much to be helpful that they’ll simply go beyond their abilities while trying to reply on Question/Answers sites. There’s no deception involved (apart from the fact that they conceal their ignorance on the matter being discussed), and sometimes they even provide misinterpreted sources to back their claims, so their reply looks trustworthy, while being possibly very erroneous nonetheless. And on a low-traffic question, chances are noone will correct the erroneous answer (even *cough* moderators).
So, thanks to such people, Today I Learned that you need a 600 Watts PSU to run a Radeon HD 5570 (NB: not a typo, I really mean a 5570). It even says that this card eats up 153 watts on idle, wow… the day AMD starts releasing such electricity eaters is the day they go bankrupt, if you ask me! It is to be noted that this reply, as it contains a link, was validated by their highly competent team of moderators.
In case you have no clue either about GPU power consumption, at the moment (July 2011), 150 W is the full-load power consumption of more than decent gaming GPUs, for instance the specified max power of the Radeon HD 5850 is 151W. Idle power consumption of GPUs are usually at most around a few tens of watts for the most power-hungry ones. As far as the HD 5570 goes, its specified max power is 39W and I don’t know about idle but I’d guess somewhere around 5-10W.
As a conclusion, when asking technical advice online, make sure the person who answers uses Opera 😉 (NB: I know, it was a hoax, but the reason why it succeeded as a hoax is because it brought scientific proof of something everyone already knew).
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