Power consumption is always a big one. So, you can see my system with the
Radeon 6870 pulls about 300 W from the
wall when I've got it under a full firm arc load. Now, what we might want to do
just for comparison's sake is fire up Prime 95. Give that CPU a little bit of
stress. So, this should represent about what kind of a power supply you should
be looking at for remember this is quite a basic system and this is an 80 plus
silver power supply. So, that's a best case scenario, but you should be using
for an SSD, a couple uh four gigs of RAM, uh quad core, this is an 875K
processor overclocked, and then a stock speed 6870. You're looking at about 400
watts from the wall. So, you want to buffer that. Make sure you got at least
kind of a 500 to 600 watt power supply,
and then scale from there accordingly to whatever else you want to add to it. So,
I'll give you some comparison numbers against the 5870 as well as the GTX 480
just so you have some context for that because remember every system is going
to be a little bit different, but uh Okay, so hold on. Let me do some quick
math here. So, and about 90%. So, we're probably pulling about 360 W from the
power supply right now. Okay, as soon as you start adding more drives and stuff,
you might see that jump up to about 400 watts. So, uh giving the power supply
some time to degrade, etc., etc. A 500
watt power supply is probably about what I'd recommend for this.
Power consumption for the 5870, as you can see, is quite a bit higher than the
6870. Now, it is a faster card, but I
don't think it's well, I guess it's pretty proportional. Remember, the 5870
and the 6870 are built using the same manufacturing process. So that means
that unlike some generational leaps, you can't just, you know, stuff twice as
many transistors into the same die size and then just call it, okay, now it's
twice as powerful. So it's not really that simple. This is more of an
evolutionary step rather than a revolutionary step. So I just wanted to
show you those power consumption numbers really quick. This is Firmark with Prime
95 running. So, with for this card, yeah, you'd need another 50 to 75 watts
of available power on your power supply, remembering that if you're me, you're
usually over buying on the power supply so that it'll run nice and quiet because
most power supplies will ramp up the fan much more aggressively past about 50 to
60% load. With Prime 95 and Firmark
running at the same time with the GTX 480, we're looking at about 550 watts
from the wall, which means that that power supply is providing about 500 W.
So, if you had a 500 W power supply with a GTX 480, a 3.8 GHz overclocked quad,
an SSD, blah blah blah, etc. about this build, then you'd be stressing it to the
max. When you're under extreme load, that fan's going to ramp right up.
really for a system like this, something like what I'm using in here, which is an
80 plus silver cougar 850 watt power
supply is a very good choice. Uh because it'll also give you the the headroom to
add another GTX 480 later on if you wanted. Although at that point, you'd
probably be pulling about 600 or so watts from the wall. And uh
yeah, even that's I guess that's fine for an 850 watt 80 plus silver power
supply. It should be all right. But ideally, as I said before, you want your
power supply doing about 50 60% duty, maybe 75% under an I, you know, an
extreme load scenario like a Firmark Plus Prime 95. I mean, how often are
you, you know, rendering video with four cores while you game, you know? So, um,
so 75% load is probably what I would target to ensure it doesn't get too
loud. Thanks for checking out my video on the heat and temperature or rather on
the power consumption of the GTX 480,
Radeon 5870 and the brand new Radeon
6870.