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Power consumption is always a big one. So, you can see my system with the

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Radeon 6870 pulls about 300 W from the

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wall when I've got it under a full firm arc load. Now, what we might want to do

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just for comparison's sake is fire up Prime 95. Give that CPU a little bit of

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stress. So, this should represent about what kind of a power supply you should

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be looking at for remember this is quite a basic system and this is an 80 plus

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silver power supply. So, that's a best case scenario, but you should be using

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for an SSD, a couple uh four gigs of RAM, uh quad core, this is an 875K

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processor overclocked, and then a stock speed 6870. You're looking at about 400

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watts from the wall. So, you want to buffer that. Make sure you got at least

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kind of a 500 to 600 watt power supply,

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and then scale from there accordingly to whatever else you want to add to it. So,

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I'll give you some comparison numbers against the 5870 as well as the GTX 480

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just so you have some context for that because remember every system is going

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to be a little bit different, but uh Okay, so hold on. Let me do some quick

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math here. So, and about 90%. So, we're probably pulling about 360 W from the

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power supply right now. Okay, as soon as you start adding more drives and stuff,

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you might see that jump up to about 400 watts. So, uh giving the power supply

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some time to degrade, etc., etc. A 500

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watt power supply is probably about what I'd recommend for this.

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Power consumption for the 5870, as you can see, is quite a bit higher than the

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6870. Now, it is a faster card, but I

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don't think it's well, I guess it's pretty proportional. Remember, the 5870

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and the 6870 are built using the same manufacturing process. So that means

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that unlike some generational leaps, you can't just, you know, stuff twice as

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many transistors into the same die size and then just call it, okay, now it's

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twice as powerful. So it's not really that simple. This is more of an

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evolutionary step rather than a revolutionary step. So I just wanted to

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show you those power consumption numbers really quick. This is Firmark with Prime

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95 running. So, with for this card, yeah, you'd need another 50 to 75 watts

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of available power on your power supply, remembering that if you're me, you're

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usually over buying on the power supply so that it'll run nice and quiet because

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most power supplies will ramp up the fan much more aggressively past about 50 to

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60% load. With Prime 95 and Firmark

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running at the same time with the GTX 480, we're looking at about 550 watts

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from the wall, which means that that power supply is providing about 500 W.

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So, if you had a 500 W power supply with a GTX 480, a 3.8 GHz overclocked quad,

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an SSD, blah blah blah, etc. about this build, then you'd be stressing it to the

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max. When you're under extreme load, that fan's going to ramp right up.

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really for a system like this, something like what I'm using in here, which is an

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80 plus silver cougar 850 watt power

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supply is a very good choice. Uh because it'll also give you the the headroom to

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add another GTX 480 later on if you wanted. Although at that point, you'd

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probably be pulling about 600 or so watts from the wall. And uh

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yeah, even that's I guess that's fine for an 850 watt 80 plus silver power

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supply. It should be all right. But ideally, as I said before, you want your

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power supply doing about 50 60% duty, maybe 75% under an I, you know, an

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extreme load scenario like a Firmark Plus Prime 95. I mean, how often are

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you, you know, rendering video with four cores while you game, you know? So, um,

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so 75% load is probably what I would target to ensure it doesn't get too

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loud. Thanks for checking out my video on the heat and temperature or rather on

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the power consumption of the GTX 480,

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Radeon 5870 and the brand new Radeon

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6870.