Thread: Calculating Amperage

Originally Posted by marshallh

As far as I know, just one wire is sufficient, I'm pretty sure they're hooked up in the same place anyway, they're just for redundancy. If anybody knows more, correct me.

gotta cut them all, and tie them all together.

multiplying by 2 or 4 will not work because the multimeter has a higher resistance than the piece of wire that is completing the second path - that is, more current will flow throught he second or third or fourth wire than the multimeter

either cut them all and measure or just tell us what you have


alternatively you could measure current going into the PSU itself.

strangely enough, my computer under no load only draws about 20 watts, and it's a P4 1.8ghz

6.5A +5.5v
4.06A +3.3v
.25A +12V

Thanks for all your help .. i've got it figured out now.

My system specs are
Mini-ATX ECS Motherboard
2100+ Sempron CPU
256MB DDR 2100 Ram
2.5" 40GB Laptop Drive
Slim DVD-ROM TECH USB adapted
USB Sound Blaster MP3+
USB GPS Ritiklan

well clearly the CPU is powered off the 5 volt line.

looks like you're right at about 50 watts

Ya thats what i figured and it makes sense since my MB does not have a P4 style connector on it.

what do you think my power draw would be?
its a P3 933 desktop cpu.
on a dell motherboard with just one atx connector. the only other item I will have is a 30 GB IBM travelstar notebook drive. Would the OPUS 80 watt / M1 90 watt from MP3car.com be sufficient?

Originally Posted by soloman02

what do you think my power draw would be?
its a P3 933 desktop cpu.
on a dell motherboard with just one atx connector. the only other item I will have is a 30 GB IBM travelstar notebook drive. Would the OPUS 80 watt / M1 90 watt from MP3car.com be sufficient?

probably.