650W or 850W? The PSU you need depends on the game you play,
not just the PC you own

If you only play League of Legends, Minecraft or Valorant, a 550-650W power supply is more than enough. But if you want to push Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra at 4K with a powerful graphics card, that same 650W falls short — and you can end up with bottlenecks, shutdowns under load, or in the worst case, damage to your graphics card. Here's exactly how much power you need based on the game, the GPU and the resolution you play at, backed by real consumption and FPS data.

It's one of the most common mistakes when building a gaming PC: treating the power supply as just another box to tick based on price, instead of as the component that decides whether the rest of your system runs stably. And the most common confusion is treating wattage as a fixed number — "I need a 750W PSU" — without factoring in that number depends entirely on what you're actually going to play.

Powering a PC that only needs to run League of Legends at 240 FPS is not the same as powering one that needs to run Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra at 4K with Ray Tracing. The first barely asks anything of your graphics card. The second can push it to draw double or triple the power during peak-load moments. Let's look at the real numbers.

1. How to actually calculate the power you need

Your PSU wattage doesn't depend on "what you have" — it depends on what your CPU and GPU draw together in the worst-case scenario: the most demanding game, at the highest graphics settings you regularly use. On top of that you need to add margin for instantaneous power spikes (transients), which on the latest generation of RTX cards can be significantly higher than average consumption.

The simple explanation: think of your power supply as the flow rate of a water pipe. If you normally need little water but occasionally open every tap at once, you need a pipe that can handle that peak, not just the average daily flow. That's exactly what a powerful GPU asks of your PSU during its highest-load moments.

2. The 4 player profiles and the PSU that fits each one

Instead of looking at wattage in isolation, it's more useful to think about what kind of gamer you are. Here are the four most common profiles and the PSU that matches each one within the Hiditec range.

3. Real-world case: League of Legends, Valorant and Minecraft (you barely need anything)

If these three games are your library, you have the most forgiving PC to build: they're graphically light titles, and the bottleneck is almost never the graphics card — it's the CPU (especially during teamfights with lots of effects on screen). Here are the real numbers:

Note: if you play Minecraft with shaders (SEUS, BSL, Complementary), GPU load rises noticeably, and it's worth moving up to the "generalist gamer" profile (750W), since that's where the GPU starts doing real work.

4. Real-world case: Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra (this is where the difference shows)

Red Dead Redemption 2 remains, years after its release, one of the most graphically demanding games out there once you switch to the Ultra preset: global illumination, tessellated vegetation, high-resolution shadows and a very long draw distance. It's the perfect example of "this is where you actually need real wattage."

Figures are indicative, based on public benchmarks with a high-end CPU (Ryzen 9 7950X). Your exact results will vary depending on the rest of your build, but the jump in power needs between GPUs is representative.

5. Why the 12V-2x6 connector (PCIe 5.1) matters even if you don't need it today

If you're going to play demanding titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra, your current or future graphics card is very likely to be an RTX 40 or RTX 50. These mid-to-high-end cards use the 12V-2x6 connector, successor to the older 12VHPWR, designed to eliminate the overheating issues that affected the first RTX 4090 adapters. Buying a PSU with this connector built in today, instead of relying on a 3x8-pin adapter, is the difference between a safe installation and an improvised one.

Pick your wattage based on the profile in section 2