Advice on psu for future watercooling

[Ginger-Menace]

Im After getting the corsair ax 850w psu for my set up, and was wondering if said psu would be capable of running this set up if i was to add a custom or kit watercooling to include my cpu and 2 gpu's

Thanks in advance

GM

[Pob255]

your tx750w should be fine for it, the only real thing you're adding will be a pump.

which is going to use a massive . . .



brace yourself for this



ready?



6 to 20 watts depending on pump.
eg a EK-DCP 2.2 uses 6.5w and a EK-DCP 4.0 uses 18w

[Ginger-Menace]

and that will be ok even though i have sli 570's? my tx750 will be ok?

[piggin23]

Go with the AX as its modular & will take extra GPU's for the future.
I went this the 1200 version, as I did not want to purchase another unit for some time.

[piggin23]

This may also come in handy

http://www.corsair.com/learn_n_explore/?psu=yes

This is more a rule of thumb, as Corsair do air on the side of caution.

[Fraz]

In the unlikely event that you could get all your existing hardware at 100% load simultaneously, I reckon at present you'd draw about 670 Watts. There is no point buying a new PSU just for your watercooling pump.

If you want to see for yourself, then use this as it's pretty good: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Or if you're really worried, just by a kill-a-watt plug/socket and measure it yourself. Most people are pretty surprised when they see just how little power their computer is drawing most of the time, when compared to the size of their PSU. I.e. like around 300 Watts, even when well loaded.

[Ginger-Menace]

i suppose i should have mentioned that my psu is about 12-18 months old if that has any impact on power

[Ginger-Menace]

i also did that corsair power thing and it said minimum of 950w psu

[scaryjim]

There's no way you'll need a 950W PSU with your rig. Look at the figures in this hexus review: that's a core i7 2600K @ 4.7GHz and a pair of GTX580s at 850MHz core. So that's a more powerful CPU, heavily overclocked, and two much more powerful graphics cards, also heavily overclocked.

Note that when the GPUs aren't in use, the power draw only rolls up to 315W, and it's only when its put under 3D load it gets to just over 700W. So with a pair of GTX570s, which are significantly less powerful than GTX580s, you're not going to be drawing anywhere near 700W.

Also, don't forget Hexus uses at-the-wall figures, so the actual PSU output is going to be a lot lower - assuming a fairly good 85% efficiency the system above actually only draws 600W from the PSU. So if a heavily overclocked i7 2600 and two GTX580s only actually draw 600W, your 750W PSU will be more than enough for an i5 2500K and two GTX570s.

[Ginger-Menace]

thanks scaryjim, my system is running fine with the sli 570's , would adding the water cooling make much difference with cpu and 2 gpu blocks?

[scaryjim]

the only extra power draw a watercooling system adds is the pump - which as Pob says adds 20W at most - and a few fans for the radiator, which is watt or two at most. The blocks are just lumps of metal - they don't use any power themselves. So unless you were already on the ragged edge, adding some watercooling kit isn't going to overload your PSU...

[Pob255]

Radiators are just lumps of metal too

If you're using water cooling to push your overclocks higher then yes your load is going to go up more.

Also something like the corsair AX which has even more stable voltages lower ripple probably could help push your overclocks that little bit higher.

As PSU's age they do start to lose some of their output, however something major to point out is that it's Age & heat & load, older cases with the psu above the cpu cooler dump a lot more heat into the psu so the component ware over time increases, Load comes in if you are running your system in ether 90%+ load or 10%- load constantly for long periods of time.

First thing to is buy a kill-a-watt and find out what your current system is pulling from the wall socket.