"Haswell Ready" PSU, how important?

[sammykhalifa]

Hi everyone,
First post here. Sorry if I sound like an uneducated noob, haha.

I'm in the "thinking of putting together a computer" stage, and will probably build around tax-return time. I have not purchased anything yet, but I've been in the researching stages. The last time I built was in 2008 so I have a lot of catching up to do.

I've been checking sales and deals, and came across a deal (not sure if we should name merchants here) for a Seasonic 620M12II modular power supply for right around 50 bucks. I was about to pull the trigger when I did some further reading and discovered it is not "Haswell Ready" meaning I'd have to disable some power saving features. I don't have what I'm getting totally nailed down yet, but it'll be a newer i5, i7, or xeon on an LGA1150 MB (my current old mobo is a Gigabyte and i'll almost certainly stick with that brand). It's a little more power than I'll likely need but I'd rather have too much than too little.

How big of a deal are the power saving features? Would you jump on a deal now knowing you're losing them, or wait around for another deal on something more modern? I don't know how often deals like that come out, but it looks like a really good PS for a good price from everything I can tell. Of course, there's no time restraint though, and I could also transfer over my year-old ThermalTake SMART 550w even though I've since learned it's not the greatest.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

 

[MongGrel]

Don't go cheap on your PSU.

 

[MongGrel]

Seasonics are normally great PSUs, not even running a Haswell myself, so that whole thing there just seems a bit odd.

I would thik a Seasonic rated that high would do it fine unless you had multiple GPU's on it maybe.

As as I do not have a Haswell running anywhere in the house I'll leave it at that.

 

[TheELF]

The power saving options are only for the sleep states, haswell can go into very deep sleep mode and some psu's can not return to normal operation from that states,but its mainly for laptops / portable devices where every little bit of battery life is very important,on the desktop you usually don't use sleep ,you just turn off the monitor (screensaver) or use hibernate if your gonna be gone for a while,and even if you use sleep you can use the old sleep states,the savings are not all that important for desktops .

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Power saving features are a part of the operating system not the PSU. Some manufacturers provide third party power saving options software. In my experience, the value of these is negligible. The most important aspect is right sizing ie. a psu that is neither too small or too large. There are many calculators online to give you an idea what you need for a particular build. You need to look at number of drives as well as CPU and GPU. Understand that GPU's have a higher demand at start than during normal operations. In general, the online calculators tend to be quite conservative. In other words following their advice will tend to insure you buy a PSU that is larger than you really need.

Once you decide which components you want, we could give you a better idea of what PSU would be adequate for your needs. Bottom line, the CPU and power saving features are less important than the rest of the components and intended use of the machine.

 

[Ketchup]

I didn't worry about it too much. I found a great deal on mine, it just happened to have support for this.

 

[phasseshifter]

most important part of your system... like others say don’t be tight with spending money on a decent supply....think ahead your prolly going to start with the basic system ...but every add on hardware wise is having an impact on the supply ...if you generally are only going to run one video card ..and don’t think you will upgrade to two or even three hardware providing then i would go with a 650/750 watt gold or platinum ...until you totally decide what you want here is some sort of base to build upon....

 

[sammykhalifa]

Thanks everyone! Yeah, I'm still getting together what I think I need--the calculators seem to say about 450W or so but I don't really know how accurate and/or how much "headroom" that leaves for expansion down the road. For now, for example, I'll just move over my current Radeon 6570 but will upgrade that some time soon (but not to a multiple card setup). I'll be doing photo editing and just some light gaming (like Civ5) and while I think my current power supply is ok as far as wattage goes (I was originally going to migrate that over too), after reading it seems like it kinda sucks quality-wise.

But yeah, thank you. I was trying to keep my original question to just the power supply but I can see how that's totally dependent on other system parts and uses.