PSU 850W-1kW Power Supply Recommendations?

Given your specs in the first post, getting a 1kw PSU is huge crazy overkill itws just wasting money. Your system as you stated will run on your current 650w PSU. Easily. If you really want high numbers on all your components go for the AX850w as its a very nice range of PSU's. Everything else your looking at is throwing money away.

 

Are you sure? I'll admit to not really knowing, but I don't want to risk my components either. I should mention that I just sold my P8P67 Pro and I'm still undecided about waiting for Ivy Bridge or not, so my components are a bit more up in the air then they were when I made the post. I might even consider Sandy Bridge-E as things go along, to try to maintain as much bandwidth to the graphics and future RAID card (think RocketRAID 2740 and 10 Force Series 3 120GB in RAID 0).

 

Your GPU's will use the most power under stress, followed by your CPU, then motherboard, then HDD's, RAM and peripherals.

According to the BitTech review of the 560 ti 448 GTX XOX 1A29XXXtreme a single card uses pretty much the same at load as a GTX 570, maybe single digits less. Since i couldnt find a good 560 448 SLI review ill use the 570 as a guide.

In a review on guru3D they said that 570's in SLI consumed 578w at the wall. For the whole system that includes a overclocked i7 965 on a x58 board, so not exactly sipping the power.

You also have to take into account that 578w figure ignores the efficiency of the PSU itself (as its the power draw going in to the unit, not the power being used by the system).

If it was a 90% PSU (pushing it since the review is a year old) then the computer was drawing 520w from the PSU itself (this is the number that is relevant when deciding what wattage you want to buy, not the reading from the wall). An 85% efficient PSU would have meant that the system was drawing 491w from the PSU itself.

Bare in mind SB chips use less power at full load than the i7 965 did, and the motherboard probably will as well. Your HDD's will consume a noticable amount of power, particularly at startup but the GPU and CPU will dwarf any other power draw in your system.

Bare in mind you dont want the PSU to be at 80% load the whole time, but you also dont want it to be below 15% load when idling or not doing much as this is horribly inefficient for PSU's.

You do not need a 1000+w rated PSU. Unless your budget triples overnight and you splurge out on 3x 580's of course. I recommend something in the 700-800w range as that will leave you with plenty of spare power for future upgrades and efficiency at both load and idle states.

 

It is amazing how many people think they need ten million watt power supplies to use 4 hdds, 3 fans, a gfx card and a CD-ROM drive.

But to be fair, in the case of those seasonic and enermax ones, you are paying for quality in all ranges.

 

Xbit Labs are very good at isolating power consumption for GPUs in their reviews. I have added a link here

Although I generally agree, I believe it would be sensible to see what the power requirements of the Kepler GPUs are likely to be before committing to purchasing a PSU. Whilst AMD and Intel are looking to minimise power draw with each die shrink, Nvidia seem to be committed to performance regardless of how much power it takes.

 

Corsair HX1050 here. OCed SB-E, SLI 580s OCed, 5 drives, 2 opticals and a H100. Doesn't really get warm.

I think the HX1050 is the unsung hero of PSUs. Much better value than the AX range, and you're not really sacrificing very much.

 

Yup Enermax

 

Bear in mind:

'While efficient PSUs are all the marketing rage in the world of power supplies, we should keep in mind that many manufacturers are trying to reach 80 Plus Platinum levels via "cheap tricks". Enermax and FSP decided to cut the EMI filtering '

From here