Sufficient Power for a New Build

[General Kenobi]

Hey,

I've got a month old Corsair CX600W Builder Series V2 power supply, which I got for a bargain price, and I was wondering if it has sufficient continous output and quality to be considered for the following Win7 build I'm currently planning on getting:

HDD - Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB SATA 6GB/s
GPU - Asus GeForce GTX560Ti 1GB
CPU - Intel Core i5 2500K
RAM - Kingston HyperX Genesis 2x4GB 1600MHz
CASE - Cooler Master HAF 912 Plus + a pair of 120mm fans
MOBO - Asus P8P67 B3
DVD-RW - Generic Asus
SC - Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (from an old build)

Thanks in advance.

Original question solved. See post #15 for the latest one.

 

[GoStumpy]

Absolutely. It's almost overkill for that setup The only reason you could need more than 5-600w is for a dual-GPU setup...

 

[General Kenobi]

Great, thanks for the confirmation. It's just that it has been suggested by some reviewers and enthusiasts that the Corsair Builder Series is of lower quality than their other product lines. That made me wonder if it could actually live to up to its promises when under load.

 

[GoStumpy]

They are not as good as the higher-end products, obviously!

However we (I have one too) buy builder series because they're the best of the best for the price (since they're often on rediculous specials, too!)

 

[Rvenger]

Its still a decent CWT unit. You will be fine. I wouldn't say its overkill for your setup since you have a GTX560Ti, its actually perfect.

 

[GoStumpy]

I suppose it is! 500w would be the minimum recommended, so 600w is perfect.

 

[General Kenobi]

Thanks for the input SLK. I'll probably look into this again when it becomes realistic to upgrade the GPU in the future, but it's good to know that the PSU should be fine until then.

 

[General Kenobi]

I forgot to ask: would this PSU still hold if I overclocked the CPU and GPU? If no, I'll hold off from OCing anything before I can get a better PSU.

 

[BoomerD]

Without knowing which 560Ti you have, I can't tell exactly how much power you need, but based on the Anandtech review of the GTX560Ti, your system should draw (under gaming load) about 320-360 watts:

Newest version:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5153/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-w448-cores-gtx570-on-a-budget

Original version:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-ti-upsetting-the-250-market

Your 600 watt Corsair Builder PSU will be fine. Personally, I wouldn't overclock either CPU or GPU, but I think you'll have the headroom to do so.

 

[General Kenobi]

Thanks for the input. The card is an Asus DirectCUII model rated at 830 MHz / 4000 MHz at factory speeds. I probably won't overclock them right away, but I do like to do it after a while to avoid buying upgrades so often.

 

[lehtv]

Absolutely. It's almost overkill for that setup The only reason you could need more than 5-600w is for a dual-GPU setup...

Not really, a 550-600W PSU is usually the bare minimum for something like a single GTX 580 overclocked. The +12V rail of CX600 is actually rated at only 480W, pretty optimal for a single 560 Ti.

 

[chin311]

should be good, im running a very similar setup as yourself and on an antec 520w!

 

[General Kenobi]

Yeah, I figured as much. It'll do until a GPU upgrade is required.

 

[General Kenobi]

Nvm, got it.

 

[General Kenobi]

Ok, so I've decided on this build. It'll be good with the CX600 and its 480W on the 12v rail, so that's fine. Now I've got a new question (or two).

If I overclock the Core i5 2500K to 4.0 GHz for daily use, and up the Asus Radeon HD 6950 DirectCU II 2GB to 880/5200 MHz, what would the total system load power consumption be? See the link for the full system specs.

Secondly, how long can I use this PSU with the aforementioned system without capacitor aging becoming a limiting factor? That is with no hardware upgrades factored in.

I've looked into the standard wattages, but it all seems to become a bit convoluted with overclocks.

Edit: The average usage would be 6h/day per year. Out of that 6h, the average gaming usage (system under load) would be 3h/day per year.

 

[lehtv]

4.0Ghz probably won't require a voltage increase so it's not going to use much more power than at stock. Around 100W assuming turbo is off.

6950 will use less than 200W without the missing shaders unlocked.

Motherboard 50W, HDD 5W, sound card 20W, DVD drive 10W - rough numbers of course. In any case this will be well under 100W.

So at full system load - that is, with everything consuming as much power as they can, which will never happen in practice, you'd use less than 400W. In practice you will use less than 300W when gaming, a bit over 300W if your CPU is doing something intensive in the background.

If you want to find out for yourself, buy a wattmeter.

Secondly, how long can I use this PSU with the aforementioned system without capacitor aging becoming a limiting factor? That is with no hardware upgrades factored in.

Hard to say, but rest assured that won't become a problem anytime soon and you don't need to worry about it. Could be a decade, or two.

 

[General Kenobi]

4.0Ghz probably won't require a voltage increase so it's not going to use much more power than at stock. Around 100W assuming turbo is off.

6950 will use less than 200W without the missing shaders unlocked.

Motherboard 50W, HDD 5W, sound card 20W, DVD drive 10W - rough numbers of course. In any case this will be well under 100W.

So at full system load - that is, with everything consuming as much power as they can, which will never happen in practice, you'd use less than 400W. In practice you will use less than 300W when gaming, a bit over 300W if your CPU is doing something intensive in the background.

If you want to find out for yourself, buy a wattmeter.

Hard to say, but rest assured that won't become a problem anytime soon and you don't need to worry about it. Could be a decade, or two.

Thanks, I wasn't entirely sure about the overclocking power consumption - some reviewers set the Radeon HD 6950 2GB Asus version PowerTune limit to +20% and got over 200W power consumption under load when overclocking. Their claimed reason for that was that the card would otherwise be limited in performance depending on the scale of the overclock.

I'm not about to try to unlock the shaders, although I hear that it's pretty simple on this card. And yeah, I probably should buy a wattmeter at some point for accurate readings, at least for future projects.

That's good to know about the capacitor aging issue. I guess I was just paying extra attention to capacitor problems what with all the bad Chinese capacitors being around a few years back... and possibly today, although I do realize that capacitor aging isn't in any way related to that phenomenon of capacitor failure.

 

[lehtv]

Yeah, 6950 max. power consumption depends on powertune, but for just an 80MHz OC you shouldn't need +20% powertune as it's just a +10% overclock.

This is from an AMD paper on PowerTune:

First, it allows TDP constrained GPUs to ship with engine clock speeds in the highest state that would otherwise have been lower without AMD PowerTune technology. This subsequently provides greater performance on the majority of applications which do not exceed the TDP constraints on the GPU. Second, it helps to avoid throttling of the GPU for extreme outlier applications by managing down the GPU clock speeds before a thermal event is flagged.

So basically the idea is that the vast majority of applications won't exceed the TDP limit set by powertune when operating at full clocks, and in the few applications where the limit would otherwise be exceeded, the GPU will downclock to avoid that. As long as you don't see downclocking during gaming, you should be getting the maximum performance with your overclock. It could be worth testing it though, e.g. overclock it, then run some benchmark and see if the benchmark result differs at powertune +20% compared to 0, even if there is no downclocking.

 

[General Kenobi]

It could be worth testing it though, e.g. overclock it, then run some benchmark and see if the benchmark result differs at powertune +20% compared to 0, even if there is no downclocking.

Yeah, I'll definitely do that, although like you said, the 20% increase probably won't necessary. There are 6950s factory OCed to 880/5200 MHz, and I doubt that they allow for any more power consumption out of the box.