Hi, Now my water cooled rig is up running and stable, I thought I would offer some info I have recorded thats kind of interesting. During benching and gaming, I have been creating a spreadsheet of everything I do and that includes power draw at the mains outlet. I was very surprised to find that most games dont stress the PSU anything like benchmarking. I thought the figures would be much closer. The Test Rig: (For power consumption reference) ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z i7 2600K @ Std settings 3x AMD 7970HD in Tri-Fire @ std settings 2x 240GB OCZ SSD's 3x 1TB Velociraptors Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 @ 1866 XFX 1250W PSU 1260 & 360 Radiators fed with D5 pump A few lovely lights... lol Results as follows: (All settings maxed for each game, using eyefinity at 5760x1200) Benchmarking: 3D Mark 11 (Performance) – 880w Heaven 2.5 – 898w 3D Mark Vantage (Performance) – 906w Furmark on 3 screens – 908w Aida 64 stability test - 1092w Gaming: Mass Effect 3 - 565w Shift 2 unleashed – 570w Syndicate – 580w Skyrim – 620w Hawx 2 – 641w Alan wake – 720w Crysis 2 – 780w There is little point to this topic, other than to show that during gaming, your PSU may not be quite as stressed as you think. Its during benchmarking that you need the extra watts for synthetic loads. Please Note: These figures were taken with everything at standard clocks so its a valid benchmark. Overclocking will increase the current required.
Very kind of you, interesting to see. I imagine then, when I get my single GTX680 installed today my wattage will never realistically go over 500w!
Are those with Vsync enables or disabled? And are the reading from the wall or do they take PSU efficiency into account?
Given the considerable differences in power consumption during gaming I'd be inclined to believe those are with vsync on.
Little update for you as it may be of use to someone... The XFX 1250W pro that advertises itself as single raila nd makes a huge song and dance about it is in fact NOT! Its Multi rail... They blatently LIE! After being annoyed for a year with random shutdowns, I discovered this with a little help from a chap over on OCN and he sent me some links where it is dissasembled and proved, so after a bit of reconfiguring of my rail distribution I solved the problem, but I am still pretty damn annoyed! Anyway... Pushed the system further now and got the following peak readings when benching 3DMark Fire Strike. (Now on a 3770K) 1GPU - 2x GPU - 3x GPU - Remember - these figures are at the wall and dont take into account the PSu conversion efficiency... but its still time for me to upgrade. Max Revo time.
Cool! If your serious about power and stable 12V rails. The Silverstone strider 1500W is what I used to use in Tri SLI GTX 580's with my old 3960X @ 5.4GHz. (Cables are not the nicest looking, but it does the job well!).
I'm guessing his figures are with his OC CPU @ 4.7GHz and GPU's @ 1250/1900? If so, then you should be able to run 2 HD7970's on your PSU.
Playing Skyrim for some 5 hours = 3kW = 75 cent (average german price @ 25 cent / kWh). What does your system draw at idle?
I've measured my own system (2 680s and i7950 ) as 511 watts in catzilla bench. Under 400 in most games. To see 1264 for tri cf in a similar benchmark is nothing short of nuts. Highest I've personally ever seen was 3 480s under 3dmark07 with an insane 1455watts of power. ( borrowed 1 of a m8 for the test lights dimmed when under usage lol) AMD needs to get power consumption in order truly insane numbers.
My AX850 ran 2 overclocked and volted 670s running furmark, and a 3770k @ 4.8 under smallfft, at the same time, and barely drew 550w. That was with a ton of lighting and a MCP655 on full speed. I wouldn't like to say how much more a stock 7970 draws than a overclocked 670, but I doubt it's 150w!!
Genuine question from someone who has never water cooled; does running all the equipment in the loop require a lot of wattage? Should I be mentally offsetting 50/100W off of these numbers due to water cooling or is the impact fairly negligible?
AMD's power consumption is fine... Its well worth noting that these readings werer all done while running my benching drive so everything is setup for max performance and stability. Once you run these 7970's with more volts the power draw increases massively. If anyone cares, I can update this topic whith figures on my normal use drive that is not overclocked.
