Best PSU for my build?

[Morgan314]

I'm looking to build my first PC, £800 budget. Here is my current build, works out around £800 with 500w Corsair Semimodular PSU. is this sufficient to run this system with view to overclock? Also if I did decide to SLI at some point in the future with dual GTX660 which CPU should I choose?

Build:
CPU: AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor (£143.99 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£24.61 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: ASRock 970 EXTREME4 ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£77.17 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Sandisk Ultra Plus 256GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£125.00 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£59.99 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 2GB Video Card (£149.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply (£60.57 @ Amazon UK)
Optical Drive: LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer (£14.99 @ Amazon UK)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8 (OEM) (64-bit) (£67.19 @ Aria PC)
Case: Sharkoon T28 ATX Midi Tower (£44.60)
RAM: Crucial BLT2CP4G3D1608DT1TX0CEU 8GB (2x 4GB) Ballistix Tactical Memory (£44.99)
Total: £813.09

-Morgan314

[flearider]

i'd up that psu to a tx 750 or 850 ...it's the heart of your pc .. and you want it strong ..

[Morgan314]

Okay thanks, I seem to be getting varying responses from people to this, as to what minimum wattage is sufficient. Do you have a suggestion of the best model and manufacturer?

[MrJim]

i'd up that psu to a tx 750 or 850 ...it's the heart of your pc .. and you want it strong ..

I disagree. Unless you're planning to use SLI in the near future, and / or heavily overclock your system, I think 600W for the PSU should be fine. I personally tend to go for Seasonic or Seasonic-made PSUs myself, as they've always proved to be very efficient & reliable. Many of the Corsair range used to be made by Seasonic, but I don't know about the CX 600W. Oftentimes reviews will mention the OEM that made a particular model, though.

Edit
----

This is a useful database:

http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page541.htm

It seems the CX600W is made by CWT, which is a solid manufacturer IMHO, but probably not as consistent as Seasonic.

[flearider]

ok I look at it this way at what power draw does the psu run best ? most run 50-60% so a 850 will run best at around 500w .. and it leave you room for future upgrades .. and yes corsair are great psu's as long as you go tx and above ..

[MrJim]

Double post

[MrJim]

ok I look at it this way at what power draw does the psu run best ? most run 50-60% so a 850 will run best at around 500w .. and it leave you room for future upgrades .. and yes corsair are great psu's as long as you go tx and above ..

This shows the energy consumption of an entire system with a GTX 680 installed, when undertaking the Tomshardware Benchmark Suite. I think it would illustrate a 'worst case' for power consumption. Their system used 352.5W, which would suggest a 600W PSU would have quite a bit of headroom, especially as the GTX 660 uses much less power than a 680.

[flearider]

This shows the energy consumption of an entire system with a GTX 680 installed, when undertaking the Tomshardware Benchmark Suite. I think it would illustrate a 'worst case' for power consumption. Their system used 352.5W, which would suggest a 600W PSU would have quite a bit of headroom, especially as the GTX 660 uses much less power than a 680.

and as soon as you overclock that go's up put a few more fans and lights in you would be easly hitting 420 or more .. and yes you can show me graphs all day but real world use normally go's above this (is that idle, normal use or max load ?)

not saying your wrong but I know what my system does and it's closer to his than yours is .. I have a 750tx and wish I would have got an 850 or even higher..

[MrJim]

not saying your wrong but I know what my system does and it's closer to his than yours is .. I have a 750tx and wish I would have got an 850 or even higher..

That's why I qualified my original post, saying that the choice of PSU depended on whether he planned to overclock or not. Since the OP specified a non-black edition CPU, I assumed he wasn't planning to OC.

[Morgan314]

Sorry if I wasn't entirely clear, i would be looking to overclock and have some headroom. Would a 600w supply be sufficient?

[Morgan314]

Also posted in Review my build, but:
What is recommended? I'm a little specific due to the way discount codes are falling so it needs to be in stock from Dabs, around £50-£60. here's what I've found. What's best?
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair...CDC.html?src=2 Cheap price
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair...758.html?src=2 More power
http://www.dabs.com/products/xfx-550...94963789&src=3 XFX but lower watts
http://www.dabs.com/products/corsair...94963789&src=3 'gaming' and looks awesome

[Pob255]

This shows the energy consumption of an entire system with a GTX 680 installed, when undertaking the Tomshardware Benchmark Suite. I think it would illustrate a 'worst case' for power consumption. Their system used 352.5W, which would suggest a 600W PSU would have quite a bit of headroom, especially as the GTX 660 uses much less power than a 680.

That's a very bad graph to use because it's a watt hour graph, not a power draw graph.
That graph shows total power used over the tests divided by the time it took to complete the tests
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...w,3328-16.html

The graphs you want are this one
and
They show an average of 183w and a peak around 375w
Hard to tell from the graph as there are so many plots on it but around 250-275w will cope with over 90% of the load with some peak spikes going over, so a 450w-500w would be fine in that it would be running under 50% load for 90% of the time and the remaining 10% would still be within 80% load

However the OP was talking about a gtx660 (peak gaming load ~120w) not gtx680 (peak gaming load ~185w) so you can knock another 60w off that graph esp the spiky bits caused by the game tests at the end of the graph.
However however the OP was also talking about OCing and sli which will both add to the power load, how much is the question?

It's impossible to say without knowing how much overclocking, but a peak of around 500w looks reasonable, so a good 600-650w should be fine for that with some OC and a 2nd GTX660 while still running below 50% psu load for the vast majority of time and peaking around 80% (that is with two gtx660 and some overclocking)

Please note "fans and lights" add almost nothing, on average a 120mm fan pulls around 2-3 watts, or to put it another way between 40-60 fans to a single gtx660
A single 12" cold cathode light pulls around 1.5w, led lights use even less wattage

In a pc the cpu and graphics card use about 90% of the total current.

[Willzzz]

Ah Pob beat me to it.

Agree with everything he said.

[karl751]

If you are kepping to 1 graphics card 600w will be fine, if you are going to double up I'd go 750-850W of the well known brands.
If you want it for gaming I would go I5 as nothing really uses all the cores on the AMD but if you want encoding etc then I'd go 8350

[TeeBlack]

i say something 650-750w.