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Enough power

T

TLobe00

Weaksauce
Joined
May 9, 2008
Messages
101
I am (re)building my pc and wanted make sure I had enough power with my current PSU

My new setup will be:

E6500
8800GT
2 SATA HDDs
1 IDE HDD
1 IDE DWD/RW
4 Gb 667 Ram (2 x 2Gb)

Thanks,
Tony
 
hahaha, forgot to put that.

I have I believe an Ultra (not sure what model) 500W
 
I'll look at it this evening when I get home.

at any rate thanks for the reply's :)
 
Zero82z said:
It does. There are a handful of half-decent Ultra PSUs, and his might be one of them.
Click to expand...

Come on...Really??? I thought most "Ultra" PSU were done by Topower! I always thought stay away from all "Ultra" or I should say "Tiger Direct"
 
Pickup a Seasonic X-650. I have the X-750 and love it! I think if you look in the hot deals someone has them on sale!
 
UMASS said:
Come on...Really??? I thought most "Ultra" PSU were done by Topower! I always thought stay away from all "Ultra" or I should say "Tiger Direct"
Click to expand...
Topower has never made a single Ultra PSU. I would certainly rather have a Topower-built PSU than something made by Wintech, which is what most of the early Ultra PSUs were. Topower as a manufacturer is decent in general.
TLobe00 said:
It is a Ultra XFinity 500W
Click to expand...
It's crap. You should purchase a new quality PSU as soon as possible.
 
if you had worthless hardware id say dont listen to them the 500 watt is fine, i mean i even run a 450watt pos thermaltake tr2 and it runs a e5200@4ghz 6gb ram, 3 hds with 4 120mm fans and a x1950xtx (its a spare bedroom pc but im on it right now i dunno why but i like using it all the parts where 40$ or less psu was 25 shipped) , i got a ultra 500 Xconnect for 20 bucks shipped and ran my buddys pc on it for 4 years and it still works fine with a opteron 165 2gb ram 2hd's 7900gs, tho this tr2 was so shitty that the pcie plug didnt run the gfx card it would just turn off, but when i used a molex adapter it worked fine off the diff rails =P id hit up a 750 silverstone seems like almost 90% efficiency and will have enough headroom to upgrade forever or close.
 
Thanks everyone!!

so obviously PSU's are somewhere I shouldn't skimp, so if I come across a seasonic or antec, or other top brand, then I should think about replacing this one I am assuming.

But for the time this one is ok to run the system?
 
how old is the psu? My guess would be that if its under 3yrs its"ok" for now. If pushing closer to 5 yrs I would replace it before anything else. Here are some options,

CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W $49.99 - $15 mir + fs

or the one I linked you to before in this thread. The 400w will run the system just fine but may limit future gpu upgrades hence the 650w i linked.
 
TLobe00 said:
But for the time this one is ok to run the system?
Click to expand...
No, I would not say that it is okay to run your system off that PSU altogether. It is a poor-quality unit and I wouldn't run anything but super low-end hardware with it.
 
NoForgiveness said:
It's really not a poor quality unit, but whatever.
Click to expand...

What's your definition of a good quality unit then? Zero82z has already shown that the XFinity 500W is based on the same platform as the Ultra X2 750.
Compare the picture that Zero82z linked to and this internal pic of the X2 750W:
http://hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIwMTY1Mzc4MVJDekhxeHhZMXdfM183X2wuanBn

Virtually the same. In the above review, the X2 750 was barely capable of 364W. As such that Ultra 500W PSU is of poor quality since that platform is barely capable of 364W.
 
As other people have said, the XFinity is basically a flaming hunk of crap. More pictures of it can be found here: http://www.modders-inc.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story3&reid=33 and it does indeed look to be based on the same platform as the X2 750.

If you can afford to replace some/all of the components in your system if it blows up and becomes homicidal in the process, go ahead and run it. If not, I suggest you replace it ASAP. As for how much power you need... your system will not use very much power. I'd expect no more than about 200w @ the wall unless you're doing some really serious overclocking.

To put it in perspective, I just put together a CAD box for one of our engineers. It's an i7 960 with 12GB of RAM on an EVGA board, with a 120GB Vertex and a HD4650-ish equivalent FirePro card on a 750w PCP&C PS. 4 120mm ~1200rpm Sanyo Denki fans. Furmark + Prime95 will get it to about 280w at the wall, as measured by a Kill-A-Watt. You'll be fine running off even a 300w PS, as long as it's honestly rated.

The Corsair 400w that someone linked to earlier is an excellent PS, and it's $35 at the moment after a $15 rebate from Newegg. You could look at something from FSP/Sparkle, but most of their units aren't much cheaper and they're probably not as good as the Seasonic-built Corsair. I wouldn't deal with Antec because I don't like their grab-bag-of-caps on the secondaries on some of their PSes and I've had bad experiences with some of their older units, but plenty of other people are happy with them and you can do a lot worse. If it were me, I'd buy either the Corsair or this unit: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151078 (which you may need a molex-PCIE adapter for); which one specifically would depend on what case you're installing it in-and possibly your CPU cooling setup.

People will argue with me on this, but there are times when you will get lower ambient and/or CPU temperatures using a PS with a front intake than you do with a bottom intake. There are a lot of variables that dictate which one works better for your specific system (airflow volume, location of the PSU relative to other components, location of intake and exhaust fans relative to motherboard and the PSU, etc.), and it's usually only a few *C either way, but it's something worth considering.
 
Siorus said:
Furmark + Prime95 will get it to about 280w at the wall, as measured by a Kill-A-Watt. You'll be fine running off even a 300w PS, as long as it's honestly rated.
Click to expand...
Might want to take those KAW figures with a grain of salt:
Paul_Johnson said:
Yes and a quick search would turn up this topic a million times over. Here is the recap:

1) APFC can fool Kill-A-Watts into giving you abnormally low readings (some times giving better than 100% efficiency)

2) Power supplies derate with temperature anywhere from 2w/c above a nominal rated at value to 10w/c.

3) Kill-A-Watt's and most power meters sample too slowly to catch transient loads (the Transient load from our tests is 117w and is COMPLETELY missed by Kill-A-Watts).

4) Power supplies last longer if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

5) power supplies are quieter if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

6) Power supplies are cooler if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

The power meters in UPS software are just as bad. You have to spend some change before you get anywhere near an accurate power meter when your PSU has APFC.
Click to expand...

Here's Paul Johnson's post, PSU reviewer of HardOCP.com, about the inaccuracy of the Kill-A-Watt:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032190998&postcount=7

Another Paul Johnson's post:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showpost.php?p=27745&postcount=26

In addition, three other PSU experts backs up Paul Johnson's statement:
Oklahoma Wolf of JonnyGuru.com:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1034843536&postcount=21
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1034555880&postcount=17

JonnyGuru of JonnyGuru.com himself as well as the senior PSU engineer over at BFG acknowledge the inaccuracies of a KAW (Post #7 in regards to Post #2):
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5977
http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showpost.php?p=29907&postcount=2

Redbeard of Corsair also acknowledges the inaccuracies:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1032811067&postcount=22
 
Danny Bui said:
Might want to take those KAW figures with a grain of salt:[snip]
Click to expand...

That's a fair point, and one that absolutely bears remembering. I figured there would be some margin of error but I didn't realize it could be that high.

That said, the numbers that I've seen from the machines I've used it on are pretty much inline with what I'd expect to see. For instance; the i5 750 has a TDP of 95w. The GPUs in the i5 systems I threw together can't draw much over 75w because they have no aux. power connector and they'd violate PCI-E specs if they did. Now, you have to make a lot of assumptions here-and you know what they say about assumptions-but bear with me.

Assume that an i5 750 will use about 95w of power @ 100% load. Assume 50w for the GPU @ 100% load-that's about what I've seen the TDP for the HD4650 specified as being at various sites, and judging by the size of the heatsink on the chip and how hot it gets I'd say that's probably pretty reasonable. Assume the board uses about 40w for the RAM, vreg inefficiencies, chipset, etc. No optical drive, and the HDD (a velociraptor, in this case) should be at or near idle so no more than about 3w for that. 10w for fans. Add it all up and you end up with 198w. Obviously, if that box is actually drawing 198w, then the ~200w from the KAW would be more than slightly optimistic. But I think that it's in the right ballpark, at least for that box.

I'm not at all saying that Paul, Oklahoma Wolf, JonnyGuru or Redbeard are wrong. The equipment they have is going to be far more accurate than what I have available to me at the moment and, well, the numbers speak for themselves.

But I can tell you that there are all kinds of OEM PCs out there running i5s and i7s on 300w or lower power supplies; Dell's Optiplex GX980, for instance. An i7 870 is optional on a machine with a 305w power supply at most; the SFF machines get by with a 235w unit. I'm not holding up Dell's Optiplex boxes as a paragon of reliability or quality hardware, by any means, but Dell typically uses Delta, ACBel or similar power supplies, which you can usually count on being fairly honestly rated. And being that companies like Dell and HP are largely run by bean counters, they typically don't like paying to put a 400w power supply in a machine that could get by with a 235w unit.

And, therefore, I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that unless you're either: a. going for moderate-heavy overclocks, b. using an especially power hungry video card (e.g. the GTX4x0, 26/8/9xx, HD58/59xx series), c. running a large number of hard drives and/or d. running more than one physical cpu, an honestly rated 350-450w power supply is going to be more than sufficient for anything you'll throw at it.
 
I picked up the EarthWatts Antec 430 mentioned in the HotDeals thread... would that work better than the Ultra XFinity?... I seem to prefer Antec over Ultra anyways.
 
TLobe00 said:
I picked up the EarthWatts Antec 430 mentioned in the HotDeals thread... would that work better than the Ultra XFinity?... I seem to prefer Antec over Ultra anyways.
Click to expand...

Yeh would work way better.
 
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