
Just several years ago, we were impressed to witness a 2,000W power supply for mining systems at Computex. But with arrival or AMD's Ryzen Threadripper WX and Intel's Xeon W-3400-series – CPUs that can devour all the way to 900W under heavy loads – as well as NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards (or, well, H100 PCIe for AI), 2,000W PSUs are no longer entirely overkill. As new processors have raised the bar on power consumption, so has the bar been raised on PSUs themselves. as evidenced by this year's show, with several power supply manufacturers showing off new extreme PSU designs that go as high as 2,800W.
To that end, I will begin the story from the least 'extreme' PSU that I saw at Computex and this is Seasonic's Prime PX-2200 80+ Platinum-badged ATX 3 PSU. The unit handled a custom-built AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX-based PC with 256 GB DDR5-4800 memory and four Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards without breaking a sweat at the trade show.