PSU Question - is 430W enough?

SeanW

Hi everyone;

I'm going to gut my home built PC (started in 2006 but overhauled every year or so since then) in about 6 months or so and I'm trying to work out what I would need.

To start with, here's what I have right now:

1. Seasonoc S12 430W power supply. 2006 vintage.
2. MSI Neo-4F K8N board, AMD Socket 939. Got that in 2007
3. Dual Core Opteron processor, 2.4Ghz. Got that not long after.
4. Gigabyte Radeon HD4670. Got that in 2009. Good match for my 14" 1024*768 screen which I'm keeping.
5. A smorgasbord of DVD-RWs, one large HDD and two SLC based Solid State Drives. Also a 7 in 1 card reader plus floppy.
6. 2 GB of RAM
7. USB powered scanner, laser mouse and a few other USB conneted gizmos.

What I plan to add/replace;

1. Mainstream LGA1156 board
2. Quad core processor for that platform, probably a Core i5.
3. 4GB or 8GB of RAM
4. GeForce GTX 460. All the aformentioned on conservative settings, i.e. no overclocking.

Where it gets interesting is that in the research I've done so far, all of the above seem to have reasonable power draws, it seems that Intel QCs need less juice than comparable AMDs. Also, I just checked some semi-real world stats here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-460-roundup-gf104,2714-18.html
showing power draws well within 400W and even 300W fully loaded at conservative settings, and that is with 12GB of RAM on an significantly overclocked Socket 1366 rig! Sounds alright.

But whenever I use those online PSU calculators, they seem to be a bit on the high side, like at NewEgg's, where I got figures North of 600W.

If any of you were considering the upgrades I am, would you try to do it with the same PSU?

VenomIreland

I'd go with at least a good 550W PSU.

Chuck Finlay

This actually is quite a tricky topic

The S12 is the older model with 'only' 14 and 15 on the 12V rails. I can't find the combined 12V load for this specific model, but it's probably not going to be 29A (compare S12II 430 with 2x17A gives 30A overall on 12V rail).

CPU and GPU are 255 W TDP. Count the mainboard and 2 fans with a generous 50, you are at 300.
Whereas a standard mouse or keyboard need 0.5W or so, DVD Drives and load up speeds for HDDs can be up to 20W, so define 'smorgasbord'

Of course most of the time those TDP marks are barely scratched and of course It's going to work under casual load, but under heavy load that might be a different question. I'd still give it a try.
The 460 connects with 2 6pin power cords and you will need a 6pin PCIe adapter on that PSU (the S12 430 only has 1, see http://www.seasonicusa.com/s12.htm).

If all my babbling scared you by now then there are always some good cheap up-to-date 450-550W units available. Corsair, Cougar, Enermax, Seasonic, you name it.

marco_polo

Have you another monitor (or planning to get one) apart from the 1024*768 which you are keeping? (Just wondering about the need for that GTX 460)

SeanW

Well, my PSU is even older than the one you have in mind, i.e. it has no 6 pin power leads at all, I had to use an adapter when I had an nVidia GeForce 6800GS. So I'm off to a bad start.

You are right though about the power on the +12v rails, 14A and 15A respectively, giving a total of 348W. If the board+CPU draws from that I could indeed see this limit being pushed if not broken.

Have you another monitor (or planning to get one) apart from the 1024*768 which you are keeping? (Just wondering about the need for that GTX 460)

Yeah, I've been thinking about that too - I just started playing Far Cry 2 and I'm getting very satisfactory performance so I could scratch the Video card upgrade and just upgrade the processor platform.

To be truthful though, my Radeon HD4670 handle my older games extremly badly, from terrible performance (less than 5fps on DirectX 7 games, to the point where SimCity 4 and Deus Ex all have to be run on software rendering or with alternative engines). Visual artifacts on older games are also a problem. nVidia cards, albeit older ones, didn't have those problems, so I think its time to go back to nVidia as a possible solution. That and the desire to be able to handle DirectX 11, leaves me looking at the lowest end possible nVidia 4xx. If they had a 450, I would take that and I probably wouldn't have this problem.

BTW would underclocking a 460 be a possibility/solution?

Edit: @Chuck Finlay, well, here's my definiton of smorgasbord

1. Western Digital Green Caviar 750GB, SATA
2. 16GB SLC SSD, Transcend brand
3. 64 GB SLC SSD, Mtron MOBI 3535.
4. LG Internal Blu Ray RE drive
5. NEC Optiarc 7203A
6. BenQ DW 1640 (old 16x drive out of production for years but had disc scanning capabilites no modern drive has, so it's coming with me in any upgrade)
7. Might add a BenQ DW1620 ... same reason as above ... if I'm feeling crazy.