upgrading my pc - is my psu up for it?

aenemic

aenemic

Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
hey fellow computer nerds. I'm thinking of doing some upgrades.

current setup:

Intel E8500 duo-core cpu
GTX 260 gpu
2gb ram
Enermax Liberty 500W psu (12v1 + 12v2 = 32A)

what I want to do is to add an ssd to install my os on, add additional ram for a total of 8gb and upgrade the graphics card to a GTX 560ti or something along those lines.

now, the big question is, will my relatively old psu be able to handle this? I've been trying to find some information, googling and checking out nerdy forums, but the answers are all over the place. mainly I'm wondering if the GTX 560 can run on this. the information from the manufacturer is useless, as usual when it comes to gpu+psu. nothing more specific than a minimum requirement of 500W. some say any old psu with 500W will do, others say you should have 600-700W.

also, the cpu shouldn't be a problem, right?

so yeah, worth checking if someone on here has something to say on the matter. it's quite a lot of money to throw on something just to try it out.
 
Eh, I had the almost exact same situation. I said screw it and installed the 560ti with my antec 500w psu and it works. What you do is go to a "how much power is my PC using" site where you fill in (as best you can) all the perepherals and cards/CPUS/Mobo ect and it tells you how much roughly you are drawing. I ended up with like a peak of 480w, which is getting close, but I've had no problems in a year.
Id wait for someone more knowlegable to come along and see what they have to say though.

EDIT: I think you want that 32A to be somewhere closer to 40 though, I remember that part being more important than the actual wattage the PSU supports. Let me open my box and I'll get back to you.

Part 2: I don't know what any of this shit means sorry.

SIDE QUESTION: Is it bad that touching the metal on my case is electrocuting me? The box is sitting on the basement floor...The main ground wire for the house is about a foot away. Should I put some sort of insulator under my rig? Or is it a bad GFCI?
 
no probs, thanks for the input. I'm aware that the 12V rail is the most important. I knew this stuff pretty well back when I built this pc, but over the last couple of year I haven't followed the evolution of gpu's at all. but you made me look for a psu calculator, which was pretty helpful. one told me that I should have around 490-520W.

as for your question, that sounds pretty damn bad. not sure what can cause it, but if the case gets electrocuted chances are the circuits on the mother board and what not may get fried. you should definitely look into that.
 
I'm not really sure. My current setup requires about 700W and I'm not that far away. I think you could try your build out, if your system underperforms, it's a clear sign.

Plus, the amperage on the 12V rail seems to be rather weak for a GTX 560. You might be looking for a new PSU after all...
 
Get a Radeon 7850 instead. Same price range as the 560ti (there's one on Newegg for as low as $220 after rebate at moment), better performance, much lower power usage.

500W would be more than enough for a rig using that card. Amperage on the 12V rail is a possible concern, but I bet you'd be fine.

As for the CPU, it will definitely cause a bottleneck with modern graphics cards... depending on the game, resolution, and various other factors. You should really be playing at 1080P with a card like that anyway, and the load shifts to heavily favor the GPU at that resolution and higher (again, depending on the game).
 
thanks for the responses.

Dario ff: that looks very similar to the other calculator I used, but this one tells me I need less than 500W.

Kyuu: I have to admit, I'm a bit partial to Nvidia. I find their drivers generally more reliable. but I've had Radeon cards before and could imagine getting one again. I checked some comparisons, and the 7850 looks a lot better than the 560ti while it uses less power. it is, however, a bit more expensive here in Sweden. I'll have to think on that a bit. but thanks for the suggestion.

oh, just realized something. the 7850 requires pci-express 3.0. my mobo only has 2.0.
 
aenemic said:
I have to admit, I'm a bit partial to Nvidia. I find their drivers generally more reliable.
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Yeah, I hear that a lot. Myself, I've had zero driver issues with my 6950 in the year or so I've had it.

I have nothing against Nvidia (my previous card was an 8800GTS), but at the moment, unless you're going to spend $500 for a 680 (and can find it in stock), the Radeon 7xxx series is simply superior at pretty much every price point.
it is, however, a bit more expensive here in Sweden.
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Ah. I have no idea what the pricing situation is in Sweden, so yeah, there may be more of price difference than there is here in the States. If you can afford the price difference (and it's not an absurdly large gap), the 7850 is definitely the superior card, though.
 
it's only about $35 more so I thought it might be worth it.

don't know if you missed by edit above, though. my mobo only supports pci-express 2.0, so I can't use the 7850. and from the looks of it, the gtx 560ti is the best pci-e 2.0 card around.
 
you're right, running it on 2.0 should be fine. thanks.

we can assume the 7850 is the best bang for the buck and will work on my 500W psu then?
 
By no means am I a fanboy, Ive owned ATI in the past, but FWIW I do recall recently people on various forums having problems with games with ATI's current gen cards. Just throwin it out there.
 
the rails are more important than the total wattage.

that being said if a 500w is sufficient for a relatively "recent" GPU then you dont have a lot of oomph in your other components.

but i generally run too many hard drives and such to go with less than a 700w to be comfortable.
 
ATI has more problems with compatibility in games because they enforce proper restrictions on their shader compilers and what not... Of course blame ATI all you want, but NVidia lets you get away with any kind of crap from experience. I've never had texture artifacts(swapping textures) like it's common with NVidia GPUs.

That's just regarding games compatibility. Regarding their drivers, I have two gripes that don't exist with NVidia:
- Screenshotting in fullscreen mode. I have to use FRAPS to take screenshots of fullscreen games, since they almost always come out black.
- No proper downsampling support like NVidia's, if you dig that sort of thing.
 
aenemic said:
you're right, running it on 2.0 should be fine. thanks.
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Yeah, PCIe 3.0 cards will work just fine on PCIe 2.0, and there won't be any performance difference.
we can assume the 7850 is the best bang for the buck and will work on my 500W psu then?
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IMO, 7850 is definitely the best bang-for-your-buck card out currently. It's impossible to say for certain it will work with your PSU, but I'm confident your wattage won't be an issue unless it's a poor quality PSU in general, and the 12V rail isn't likely to be an issue either (again, assuming it's a decent-quality PSU).

@ Wesdude: I run an over clocked i5-2500k and an over clocked Radeon 6950, and my 650W PSU is overkill. I could pop in a 2nd 6950 for crossfire and likely be fine. The 7xxx-series (the ones that aren't rebadged 6xxx/5xxx cards, of course) is more power-efficient than the 6xxx-series, using less power while also giving better performance. People generally pay for way more wattage than they really need.

Besides, if his PSU does blow up, you can get a decent 600W for like $40-$60.
 
If your worried about your PSU and live in the UK i have a 750watt PSU I can donate.
 
thanks for all the help. I've decided on a Sapphire HD 7850 oc-version, 2gb of additional ram and a 128gb ssd.

my goal is really to upgrade as much as I can without having to replace motherboard, psu or cpu. when this stuff doesn't cut it anymore, I'll build a new one from scratch.

I would've prefered a nVidia card, for reasons mentioned by myself and others - they just seem better supported and more reliable. but I don't exactly have a horrible experience of AMD and I'm positive it'll do. I'm not usually that concerned with playing the latest games at the moment they're released anyway, so I can wait for drivers and patches to catch up.
 
Out of curiosity , Sapphire with Vapor-X ? This cooling is really worth it. Also , which SSD, Crucial M4 I suppose ?
 
the 7000 series doesn't come with vapor-x. it's dual-x cooling on this one, not sure if it's the same but better or not.

as for the ssd, it's an OCZ Octane 128GB. can't use SATA3 so I didn't have much to choose from. this one was the cheapest for the size, and seems to have some good reviews.
 
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