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Rickster
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Whats your budget?
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Wondering if this PSU will be sufficient?
- Thread starter FrEaKo
- Start date
Whats your budget?
S1lv3r H4wK
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He said under 15k
Hahahaha @wizardofid going to burn you now!
Rickster
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Well he has 3 options:
Buy this 650W CM for R1100 or
spend less money for less watts (which is pointless since minimum for his setup should be 650W
or spend more money for more watts and a better name brand (but he might not have enough money to do this)
Actually, for R1200 he could get this sweet 700W Corsair.
Nah, for R900 he should get the SeaSonic M12II, 620w and R1200 the SeaSonic M12II 750w if stock becomes available before he buys.
However, I still believe his 500W will be sufficient until money becomes available for a better PSU, although the theories disagrees with my belief.
How many A does the R9 280X require?
Edit: 8 phase x 45A/phase GPU PWM configuration on his Asus card
Last edited:
wizardofid
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Get the corsair
Look CM low end is part crappiest of budget PSU's out there the 500watt one is part of that group it is well suited to door stop duty.
Mid range is okay, quality control is not the best as your PSU might be from 1 of 3 different factories. They capxon and teapo, not the best or not the worst, however you want at least a Jap cap on the primary side of the PSU and maybe the 5 volt standby, teapo on secondary side even capxon is "good" enough, but if you throw a second tier cap, on the primary side you just asking to get fingered in the shower.
high end Cm's have better quality control and better caps also means dropping a cool 2.5K, also they use a more efficient topology hence the plat ratings.
Mid range Antec, Seasonic, XFX, bequiet and corsair RM and gaming series, maybe raidmax pending which one you get, offer the best bang for buck, any else would just provide a "bang" and lots more money to replace hardware when the protections on these bugdet PSU's fail.
Rule of thumb is you need to spend at least a grand on a PSU, regardless of wattage.
hmmmmmm.... Over the years I've spent a lot of rands on PSUs. Most of them under the R600 mark and usually 550W or less. Some of them still work to this day.
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/606708-R-I-P-Old-faithful-PSU?highlight=aopen
^this must have been an odd one to the Rule of thumb
wizardofid
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over head is good go ask johnny guru
it's not theories if you can actually more than often see efficiency go down the drain with actual test.Just remember the corsair is single rail where as the CM has dual or more rails, meaning virtual rails even thought 36 amps is the max you can pull on the rail you have to remember there are other items on the rail which uses 12 volt, which means if there is a PCI-e virtual rail it will only get a share of the rail, rail protections will kick in when you try and pull more the provisions on the virtual rail.
So regardless of the GPU saying it needs 12 amps for example, you need to make sure that the PCI-e rail is capable of delivering 12amps irrespective of the whole railing having 36 amps in it, the whole rail isn't dynamically allocated as needed, each rail has a max output even then you can't add the rails together to get total output as the rail are virtual and all share the main rail pool.
which comes down to it again overhead, safest rule of thumb is 200watts.
To the OP's question then: Will his 500W be good enough for the new setup? With explanation and calculations ofcourse.. I want to calculate if I should upgrade my Antec 620 as well if I plan to stick a R9 290X in there (which I don't believe is necessary), but the PSU is going on for almost 3 years now.over head is good go ask johnny guru
chromedome
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That's what I ended up buying,comes with a 5yr warranty.
wizardofid
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lol wrong again, those PSU's were actually 5volt heavy PSU's and considerably stronger, they not are not like the 12volt heavy PSU's of today, a lot more cost cutting methods are done today, where back in the day there were only a handful of PSU brands.
It's really only Aopen 700watts or more PSU's, below that, was horrid.Problem, is a psu may last 50 years, but the same PSU for the next guy only 2 months, it all depends on how the PSU was used, and cared for ect.Why a more pricy PSU is being suggested, it is not because the are better alone, a cheap psu may last just as long and "work" fine.
The problem is they have very little protections in place, will bypass protections altogether and blow the system any ways, even with standard protections in place, they use thinner gauge wire, fire hazard in progress, and they have terrible ripple, HDD and GPU memory serial killer number one.
So go ahead buy a cheap PSU, will do exactly the same job might last equally as long, lets see how often your hardware breaks, for no apparent reason..
There is actually speak of making a 12volt only PSU in the future, as it is, motherboards already derive 5 volt and 3.3volt from a 12volt in put.
Rickster
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over head is good go ask johnny guru
Just remember the corsair is single rail where as the CM has dual or more rails, meaning virtual rails even thought 36 amps is the max you can pull on the rail you have to remember there are other items on the rail which uses 12 volt, which means if there is a PCI-e virtual rail it will only get a share of the rail, rail protections will kick in when you try and pull more the provisions on the virtual rail.
So regardless of the GPU saying it needs 12 amps for example, you need to make sure that the PCI-e rail is capable of delivering 12amps irrespective of the whole railing having 36 amps in it, the whole rail isn't dynamically allocated as needed, each rail has a max output even then you can't add the rails together to get total output as the rail are virtual and all share the main rail pool.
which comes down to it again overhead, safest rule of thumb is 200watts.
You dont add the sum of the rails.
wizardofid
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Rickster
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My PSU has a Quad 12V rail @ 34A, does that mean the pool is 136A?
So quality has gone down over the years? That's kinda sad...
Luckily this never happened to me and a lot of people I know (touch wood). So, I'll take that 0.01% chance that it can happen, maybe.The problem is they have very little protections in place, will bypass protections altogether and blow the system any ways, even with standard protections in place, they use thinner gauge wire, fire hazard in progress, and they have terrible ripple, HDD and GPU memory serial killer number one.
So go ahead buy a cheap PSU, will do exactly the same job might last equally as long, lets see how often your hardware breaks, for no apparent reason..
Now more importantly, as I previously stated: To the OP's question then: Will his 500W be good enough for the new setup? With explanation and calculations ofcourse.. I want to calculate if I should upgrade my Antec 620 as well if I plan to stick a R9 290X in there (which I don't believe is necessary), but the PSU is going on for almost 3 years now.
Edit: assuming that slight chance that your components will fail due to the ripple is non existent.
wizardofid
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Oh look a review for 2009, you do know that they update designs and or changed it.In fact this is an old design, newer or at least more trust worthy PSU's uses a single cap on the transient filtering, uses craptastic 4th tier crapacitors.It failed ripple and noise tests, that is good enough not to use it ever.I don't care what hardware secrets say, unless it is a review from johnnyGuru, every one else can pretty much stick their paid for reviews, point is hardware secrets is biased as much as tomshardware is, they are too damn scared to diss a product for the fear of not getting other products from these companies, most of the time Oklahoma wolf has to go buy the stuff they want to review because of their take no prisoners attitude.
However I have the newer updated version of this PSU, at least FSP is making it now, actually reviewed it a while back on carbonite.co.za
not too shabby overall, still wouldn't be caught dead with it.You get what you pay for, rings pretty true here.