Advice on graphics card and power supply

[MrKipling8]

Hi, hope you've all had a good christmas I'm looking to upgrade my current graphics card with my christmas money to one that can cope better with 3D gaming, and am thinking of the one below. I was just wondering if its any good and if its much better than the one I've got now. I think the 580 is way to expensive right now and the 570 seems to offer a lot better value for money. I also want an nVidia card this time round incase I need to change from iz3D to nvidia 3D vision.

Also, I'm going to need a new power supply. I've found one in the link below so I'm also wanting to know if it will power the graphics card okay as well as all my other components, and has all the correct leads. I've got an Antec Nine Hundred case which I'm thinking should fit fine but if anyone can confirm that it would be great. Thanks for your help and have a good new year.

My current specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 945 3.00GHz (Socket AM3) Processor
ASRock M3A770DE AMD770 (Socket AM3) DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard
OCZ Gold 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit
Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
OCZ OCZ400SXS-UK StealthXStream 400W Silent ATX2.2 Power Supply
Samsung Blu-ray drive
Windows 7 64bit

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1280m...s-dl-dvi-mhdmi

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/950w-...ingle-12v-rail

[MrKipling8]

Found these too.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1280m...s-dl-dvi-mhdmi

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1000w...ssfire-eps-12v

[Domestic_Ginger]

the 570 should be about £260. Warranty should be the decider on your card and the standard stock cooler is meant to be good.

470s should be around £180 and the stock cooler is not meant to be brilliant as its quite a hot card.

I have a 550w psu and would be happy running my quad core phenom II with a 570 on it. 1kw is massive overkill and would power a 480s in SLI with your setup. The modular antec 650w is meant to be very good at about 65, scan had them last time I looked.

If you are not completely convinced by nvidia the 5850 for about 124 looks good value to me; I would get one of these over the 470.

[MrKipling8]

Haha, just read my post again. I meant I prefer the 570. Its the 580 thats too expensive. I'd rather buy a mega power supply though so theres plenty of power for future upgrades. My 400W one hasn't even lasted a year.

[watercooled]

You're going a bit overboard with the power supplies there, a good 650w should be plenty for that system. Maybe this?. I'm not completely up-to-date with current graphics cards but you might want to go for one of the Nvidia 5 series, you should get more for your money but you're best waiting for someone who's been keeping themselves current. It's a pity you're stuck with Nvidia as AMD have some very attractive cards out ATM and at some very competitive prices.

Edit: beaten to it. I was doing a bit of research on the power draw of the Nvidia cards before posting.
Sorry, I know that looks suspicious having the same sort of recommendations but I did reply without seeing the previous post. Honest! Great minds, eh??

[MrKipling8]

Lol. Well apparently nvidia 3d vision doesn't like zalman monitors so I might as well look at amd cards as well. I'm looking into spending around £300 for a card plus whatever needed to power it. The gtx 570 requires 550W I think, so would 650W not be pushing it a little? I think 300 should get me a card that will last a good year or two.

[MrKipling8]

How about this amd one? not got a clue how to compare them. I just go off price

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-a...dp-2x-dvi-hdmi

[watercooled]

I think that's a very good card for the price, it's probably what I'd choose in that price range. Also, that PSU recommendation from Nvidia is for the whole system, most likely with a very power hungry CPU, etc.

[MrKipling8]

I think that's a very good card for the price, it's probably what I'd choose in that price range. Also, that PSU recommendation from Nvidia is for the whole system, most likely with a very power hungry CPU, etc.

Thanks for your help. I've just had a quick look on the amd website and it says that the 650W power supply isnt supported. The 1000W one is but might be more expensive to run. Think this 700W one is supported though:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/700w-...s12v-135mm-fan

[watercooled]

Don't worry about it not being 'supported' - it will work fine, it's not an exhaustive list. And FYI a 1000w PSU won't necessarily be more expensive to run - PSUs only take what they need from the wall. I.e. assuming the same efficiency, a system with the same components will use the same amount of power with a 400w PSU as it will with a 1000w PSU.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AFAIK,the HD6000 supports 3D gaming too.

I would consider an HD6950 2GB:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/250399

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-x...vi-hdmi-2x-mdp

An HD6950 2GB consumes less power at load than an HD4870:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/H...D_6950/27.html

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=27983&page=18

It seems that the HD6950 2GB and HD6870 1GB have similar peak power consumption.

IMHO,an HD6950 2GB would probably be fine with your existing PSU as long as the CPU and graphics card are kept at stock clockspeeds.

[pipTheGeek]

Don't worry about it not being 'supported' - it will work fine, it's not an exhaustive list. And FYI a 1000w PSU won't necessarily be more expensive to run - PSUs only take what they need from the wall. I.e. assuming the same efficiency, a system with the same components will use the same amount of power with a 400w PSU as it will with a 1000w PSU.

True, but a PSU is generally at its most efficient around 50% load and most of the time at least some component in the PC is not working hard. So there is some benifit in picking a realistically sized PSU.

I know switchmode supplies have a minimum power they can supply, do the very high power units have a higher minimum power? For example, would I get problems if I tried to use a 1000w monster to power a little atom based system?

[watercooled]

A 650w PSU is a 'realisticly sized' PSU, it would power the system without breaking into a sweat and at a decent efficiency. There's only about a 3% difference in efficiency between peak and lowest realistic efficiency on the PSU I linked, if you want more efficiency you might be better going for a newer model. Higher wattage doesn't imply better efficiency. Anyway, your current 400w PSU should be able to power the system as CAT said but it would be stressing it pretty hard at max load, now bear in mind in real-world conditions the system will very rarely reach this state, only really under load from synthetic benchmarks designed to stress the system as hard as possible.
Power supplies often have a minimum load, they can run very inefficiently or supply bad power below this level. However, for newer PSUs the minimum load is so low you're not likely to encounter it unless you power a nettop with a 1kw PSU. But still, PSUs are usually designed to have peak efficiency at above 20% load so they pass 80Plus as well as possible and below that some PSUs drop efficiency pretty badly and bear in mind that's where your system will spend most of its time with too big a PSU.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The systems in the reviews I listed are using overclocked Core i7 CPUs and will consume more power than a Phenom II X4 945 especially if it is the 95W version. The X58 motherboards also use more power than the 770 motherboards too.

[pipTheGeek]

A 650w PSU is a 'realistically sized' PSU...

Which is what I was getting at. It was the 1000w that I thought was excessive.

I've corrected my spelling now.

[MrKipling8]

So if the card requires at least 550W, would a 650W supply be more than enough for the rest of the components. I just fear the blue screen lol. Which would be a better card then overall, AMD 6970 or GTX 570?