OCZ 520w PSU Strong Enough?

[dcr]

Hey all,

I bit on two of the EVGA in a flurry of credit card activity.

I never once stopped to consider that I need to power these damn things.

My system will be:

2 X DVD drives
2 X HD 7200 RPM
1 X 3500 A64
2 X 7900 GTO
1 X Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
1 X OCZ 520w Powerstream PSU

I won't be OC'ing this rig.

 

[Matt2]

You should be fine.

I ran a ver similar base system as yours, but with a 3000+ Venice @ 2.7GHZ and 2x7800GT @ 500/1200 with a weaker Fortron Blue Storm 500w PSU. Rock solid. in fact, even more solid than my current setup.

 

[dcr]

Ok, I'll give it a go. Thanks!

 

[40sTheme]

It will probably work. BTW, how much do you love that psu? It freakin' rocks, doesn't it? I know mine does. It's definitely near silent. Quieter than my stock Dell one for sure.

 

[Corporate Thug]

you'll be fine

 

[jiffylube1024]

PowerStream 520W - you should have no problems whatsoever. That's one of the most solid PSU's ever built. I just sold mine and I feel like an idiot. The only thing I don't like about it is no active PFC (it's only about 61% efficient with power, vs. 80% efficient appx on active PFC PSU's).

 

[CP5670]

It's not that bad with the efficiency, around 75% from Jonnyguru's tests.

OP: As others have said, it should handle your setup easily.

 

[Zebo]

2 X DVD drives = 20W ea burn total 40W
2 X HD 7200 RPM = 22W ea total 44w
1 X 3500 A64 = 35W to 70W depending on process.. say 70W
2 X 7900 GTO = 80W ea 160W
1 X Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe = 25W


You need at least 339W on 12volts rail

 

[n7]

It should be quite fine.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: Zebo


2 X DVD drives = 20W ea burn total 40W
2 X HD 7200 RPM = 22W ea total 44w
1 X 3500 A64 = 35W to 70W depending on process.. say 70W
2 X 7900 GTO = 80W ea 160W
1 X Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe = 25W


You need at least 339W on 12volts rail

I think your figures are a bit off on components.

Optical drives take like ~5W if I'm not mistaken (certainly when not reading; when reading then maybe 10W). Similarly hard drives are 5-10W last I heard.

CPU is pretty much bang-on but remember with overclocking power usage goes up (dual core Opteron with 1MB cache would eat ~100W at load). Motherboard might be a bit higher since Nvidia's NF4 chip is a power hog (actually the NF4 SLI is about 25W; the NF4 SLI with dual 16X PCI-e eats about 40W load! ATI's Crossfire board only uses ~22W).

Video cards, again, could push 90W each with overclocking.

 

[Elfear]

When I was contemplating selling my 520W OCZ I found an article about Kinc and Crotale (I believe) over at XS where they fired up a pair of X1800XTs or X1900XTs on LN2 and were pushing some crazy clocks with a 520W Powerstream. You'll be fine with your GTOs.

 

[dcr]

Originally posted by: 40sTheme
It will probably work. BTW, how much do you love that psu? It freakin' rocks, doesn't it? I know mine does. It's definitely near silent. Quieter than my stock Dell one for sure.

Yeah, it was probably the best component I bought when I built the system it came in. It has survived through 3 builds since, and soon the 4th here.

 

[JAG87]

IMO youre cards are going to be starved with 8x SLI and a 3500+

You could have gotten the same framerates with one of those cards. Unless of course you are running very high resolution... which doesnt seem the case.

 

[dcr]

At this point, 8X SLI vs. 16X appears to be a myth as far as performance increases are concerned. I am running a 21" Widescreen at 1680X1050.

If the processor chokes the system, I'll upgrade it.

 

[JAG87]

wow 1680... SLI is such overkill for that.

1 GTO properly overclocked or flashed to GTX will give you the same performance as 2 GTOs in SLI. Even if you run both overclocked as GTXs in SLI, the performance increase over 1 GTX at that resolution will be so minimal due to your CPU limitations.

While your still in time, cancel your order and get just 1 GTO and run it as GTX. If I were you, I would invest the saved 300 dollars in a new CPU. Maybe a 4200+ or a 4600+ s939. and ignore those people that say dual core does no improvement to games. You get great performance scaling with dual core. A good example is the source engine. With dual core you no longer suffer the "firefight" or "granade" lag effect, because the physics calculation load is evenly shared by the two cores, loading 50-60% each core instead of loading all onto one core and bottlenecking all the other traffic.

Plus oc your cpu to 2.6-2.8 ghz, and presto you have top of the line (FX 62) amd performance with a 7900 GTX.

 

[dcr]

Well, you aren't me, but thanks for the advice.

I know what plans I have, and will be just fine.

 

[Pens1566]

You'll be fine. PS520s are quite capable of that load.

 

[JAG87]

Originally posted by: dcr
Well, you aren't me, but thanks for the advice.

I know what plans I have, and will be just fine.

Im just giving you advice.

What you have planned is not the most performing setup. I use 2 GTXs to play at 2560x1600. Your resolution is like a third of that. A better CPU will give you greater gains for gaming than SLI.

Actually people should make it a rule of thumb not to get 2 GPUs if they dont have 2 CPUs...

 

[Captante]

I agree that dual-core does help gaming performance more then many people seem to think by deviding tasks between cores, but all the benchmarks I've seen show that SLI helps at any resolution above 1280x1024 even with a slow single-core cpu & that by far the biggest gains in framerate come from increasing clockspeed.

 

[dcr]

I guess we'll see. I'll run the system with one card, and then two cards.