Hi, I'll be running an overclocked i7 930 (not extremely overclocked however), 6gbs 1600dominator memory, 2x Nvidia 460s and a single 1TB 6gb/s Hard drive. Any reccomendations on what sort of size my PSU should be, I was looking at a 950w modular Powercool, which would be good though I'm not sure about whether this will maintain stability with an overclocked cpu? My budget is anything upto £100 really and I would prefer modular but this is not necessery. Thanks, Bill.
Over 9000 ! ^^ Hummmmm Powercolor PSU, are they not discontinued ? I think you'll be fine with a Corsair 850W
950W is ludicrously overkill. Check my sig and PSU. I could run dual 460 GTXs rather than my 260 GTX SLI set up easily on my PSU.
+1 on this ^, the man talks sense, 950w is a serious amount of overkill. If it was me I would be looking at a good quality 750w PSU max (definately not a Powercool), just to give you plenty of headroom for the future.
stay away from the powercool as it will be rubbish. dont think you will need above 750W to be honest try this link: http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine did a quick check should be around 700 Watts so grab a 750-850W. so you fell for the marketing BS then. your HDD will never saturate SATA3 doesnt even saturate SATA2. The corsair 850W suggested is a good choice.
Awesome, I think I'm gonna go for a 750w or 850w Corsair or maybe an antec then, Thanks for the link as well. I did wonder whether this was really the case, considering I thought that Sata 3 was primarily for SSDs rather than normal HDDs, I think I'll just go for a SATA 2 then considering itll cost me £30 less. Thanks again. Bill.
Power supply calculators are always seriously off; they always recommend far more than you'll need. You'd be fine with a decent 600W power supply. Corsair's TX650 would be plenty, and would be £40 less.
The PSU calculators are only off because it auto assumes your using 90% load all the time. 650W would more than likely be fine for everyday use and even gaming but i wouldnt want to run prime95 on all cores with GPU benchmarks running in the background.
Adam - check my signature. This rig was 100% stable while running Folding @ Home on the CPU and both GPUs.
hmm true do the 460 use less power than 260 ? but id rather hit the sweetspot with PSU rather than nearly maxing it out. since peak efficency is around the 70-80% mark on most PSUs i would rather have something slightly bigger that hit this rather than push it close to max output
460 consumes less power than the 260. Your right that from an efficiency perspective its better to have a slightly higher wattage PSU than the one I have already, but I just cba to spend £100 on a Corsair 750W on something that won't improve my system at all. Would rather spend it on an upgrade
In gaming conditions, a GTX460 SLI setup will not use much more than 470W. Tom's Hardware, for example, in this graph are running a GTX460 SLI setup with a six-core i7 980X at stock speed: This doesn't include full CPU load, though it wouldn't be much more. Power supply calculators on the whole are completely inaccurate. A TX650 leaves a hell of a lot of headroom.
Unless you're planning on SLIing GTX480s or Crossfiring 5970s alonside a heavily overclocked 6 core i7, you don't need any more than 650w for most setups nowadays.
