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290 CFX Questions

Brownstone

Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2007
Messages
873
Sooo

Im thinking of adding another 290 and have 2 total. Ive got 2 questions.

1) Is my 850w PSU enough ?

2) I currently have a gigabyte, but i can only find sapphire in stock now. Will they work together ?
 
1) What exact model 850W do you have?

2) Yes, no problem.
 
Since all reference 290s are the same right now it should work together no problem. As far as the psu goes it might be OK if it's high quality
 
Well 2 x 290's is 700 watts not overclocked.. that leaves 150watts to run what every else you have which is really not much when you add drives/fans/water pumps etc..
 
If you're not overclocking, a decent 850W supply should be suitable in my opinion. I do not have any knowledge or experience with yours though.



Well 2 x 290's is 700 watts not overclocked.. that leaves 150watts to run what every else you have which is really not much when you add drives/fans/water pumps etc..

Keep in mind the number you often see is wall draw rather than DC draw. If you have an 80% efficient PSU, its only delivering 560W to the cards when it is 700W at the wall.
 
Will not OC the cards, also since its a mining rig for now. Im gonna downclock the CPU
Should be good for now then, i ll get a better PSU when i OC
 
a quality 800-850 is enough if not OCing.

I am running two 290s (well a 290X + a 290) and a 220W CPU along with 32GB ram, 6 SSDs and a H100 off a Corsair 750W PSU. At all stock, not a hiccup at all. ANY bit of OCing though and will get some hard locks/resets. Would I trust this to last several years ? Absolutely not.. long enough to find a decent 900-1200W psu on sale .. absolutely (again NO OCing).
 
My 290's at 1125mhz and my 3930k at 4900mhz 1.435V ballpark around 1000W at the wall with a kill-a-watt if I run P95+3dmark. Not the most accurate measure but its close enough for me to know if I wanted a third card I would have to get a bigger PSU probably.
 
I'm mining just fine on 2 290s overclocked with 4 hard drives, a SSD, a DVD drive, 6 fans, and an overclocked 2500k just fine on a Seasonic 850w.
 
I have the same setup (except my 850w is a corsair). In gaming at +50mV/+50%Power/1125/1400, it draws about 650-675 at the wall (kill a watt reading). My CPU is not OCed at the moment though. Keep in mind wall readings about 11-12% higher than what the PSU is actually providing to the PC, so in my system it's actually only a 590-600W draw on the PSU - plenty of headroom for CPU OCing.

Frankly, unless you plan to use three video cards, I really can't see a scenario in which two of almost any card along with a normal gaming setup would not be fine on a quality 850W supply. Even furmark and other benchmarking software will not bring you close, UNLESS you run a CPU and GPU stress simultaneously. IMO, however, this is so far beyond what I would consider to be reasonable system use, it doesn't represent a problem.
 
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