How to choose a power supply for your new gaming PC

Friends don’t let friends buy bad power supplies. The PSU is the unsung hero of your system, cleaning incoming power from the wall and providing it as needed to each of your PC components, all at precisely the right voltages. It's critical to get a quality power supply, but shopping for one can get complicated quickly, so let's break it down a bit. 

We offer a few distinct lines of products when it comes to PC power supplies, each with its own look and feature set: 

• The ROG Strix Aura Gold Edition line of power supplies offers high performance in an accessible package, with ROG flourishes like an Aura Sync-compatible RGB logo on the side. 
• The ROG Thor collection of power supplies offers high wattages with excellent performance, incredible cooling, and unparalleled efficiency for high-end builds, complete with Aura Sync RGB lighting and a small OLED display on the side that shows your current power draw. 
• The ROG Loki is, as its name suggests, a smaller brother to the Thor line, providing Platinum efficiency in an SFX-L size for small form factor Mini-ITX builds. 
• The ASUS TUF Gaming Gold power supplies offer efficient, dependable power for builds of all stripes, engineered to stand the test of time and power your rig (or rigs) for years to come. 

However, even within those distinct lines of products, you’ll need to narrow down your options. Here’s everything to consider when shopping for a power supply. 

How much power do you need? 

Before you choose a power supply, you need to narrow down your power requirements. ASUS and ROG offer options from 750 watts with all the way up to 1600 watts with the ROG Thor 1600W Titanium. If you aren’t sure what your next machine will require, we have a handy table for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, past and present, that suggests the wattage you’ll need based on your hardware. So if you have an Intel i5 processor and an RTX 4080, you’ll want a 750W power supply like the TUF Gaming 750W Gold or ROG Strix 750W Gold Aura Edition. Bump up to an i9 and RTX 4090, and you’ll need to bump up the power supply to 1000W as well.  

You might also choose a power supply one level higher than required if you have an above average number of USB devices, plan on overclocking your system, or just want to set yourself up for the future — a good power supply can last you multiple builds, and our ROG and TUF Gaming power supplies come with a ten-year warranty so you can buy with confidence. 

Waste not, want not: Choose your efficiency level 

The max power rating, or max wattage, is a great way to understand the capabilities of a power supply, but you should also consider a PSU's efficiency rating. When a power supply draws electricity from the wall, some is necessarily lost in conversion for your components. The higher a power supply's efficiency, the better it is at turning a watt of power from the wall into a watt of power for your PC, which means a lower power bill, less heat, and less noise. Less efficient power supplies might have a cheaper up-front cost, but you end up paying for more electricity that never makes it to your gaming machine and instead gets lost as waste heat. 

Fortunately, all current ROG and TUF Gaming power supplies are 80 Plus Gold rated or higher, meaning that when running at 50% load, they can turn 90% of the AC power from the wall into DC power for your computer. More premium power supplies like the Thor 1000W Platinum II or the Thor 1600W Titanium bump up the efficiency even further, offering the very best in modern PSU technology. 

Easy cable management: Modular vs Non-Modular 

Many power supplies come with all the cables attached to the main unit, which means you can just plug them in and go — but they can also create a bit of cable clutter inside your machine. All ROG and TUF Gaming power supplies are modular, meaning they allow you to disconnect the cables you don't use for a cleaner look. Don't have any SATA devices? No problem, just leave those cables in the box and save yourself the hassle of cable management right from the very beginning. 

In addition, many current-gen graphics cards use the brand new 12VHPWR standard. The current generation of ROG and TUF Gaming units come with dedicated 12VHPWR cables included, meaning you won’t need an adapter for a graphics card that uses that standard. And the beauty of modularity is that if you have a GPU with the standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors, your ROG PSU will have a full set of cables to support that card as well. 

Treat yourself to a little something extra 

Our ROG power supplies wouldn’t live up to the name if they didn’t include some of our signature features. As noted above, our Thor PSUs support Aura Sync RGB lighting and feature a built-in OLED display, both of which are controllable via Armoury Crate. With the touch of a button, you can easily coordinate the RGB illumination of your PSU with the rest of your rig, and the OLED display lets you keep an eye on how your system is doing, no monitoring software required. The Thor line also comes with custom sleeved cables and combs, giving your system a classy and easy to manage flair. 

We’ve also built an incredible cooling solution for all our ROG power supplies, with additional heatsinks installed that are not required for normal operation. This means that even in some gaming loads, the fan won’t need to activate to dissipate its heat, giving you truly silent operation. When needed, that 135mm Axial-tech can spin slower to keep itself whisper quiet at all times.  

Finally, while black works with most builds, some builders like to opt for a white theme to lighten up their system. With that in mind, we developed white editions for a few of our power supplies, like the ROG Loki 850W Platinum White Edition. Built with the same high-end components, but coated in white and paired with matching white full modular cables, your build will never look the same. 

No matter which power supply you choose, you can feel confident that your system will receive reliable, stable power for whatever components you’ve packed into your gaming PC. Check out our full line of power supplies here to find the right one for you.