This is essentially true. An side effect though is to protect equipment from permanent damage. However, this side effect is usually only employed on higher quality merchandise.
Fuses definitely do not protect electronics, but they can protect circuit board traces.
Both of those are way overkill for most machines. I've got a good quality 330W in one machine, a 220W in the other. Both have been fine for many years.
You only need a huge power supply if you are driving a high-end graphics card or many hard drives.
Chris
Indeed. For comparison, consider this server from Apple:
Two 3 GHz dual-core Xeon processors 32 GB of RAM 3 300 GB 15000 RPM SAS drives It's got a 650W supply. Or how about this one from Pogo Linux?
Four 2.8 GHz dual-core Opteron processors 64 GB of RAM 5 SCSI hard disks 12 case fans
(I'm not bothering to list things like CD drives, ethernet, etc, on any of those).
That's got 850W. He must have one hell of a server if he really needs
750W.My home server has used 27 KWh over the last 225 hours, so that works out to 120W (it runs 24/7).
For a home non-server machine, 500W *may* be reasonable. A high-end graphics card might use 120W. So, figure two of those, in some kind of SLI setup or something like that. Now throw in a pair of fast dual-core processors, lots of RAM, high end sound card, a couple big fast disks, and you could maybe need 500W.
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