PSU question

[BlairR9270]

I have a Corsair CX600 PSU that I have had less than a year. And I do not want to replace it yet. Anyway my system specs are
CPU: i5 3470
Mobo: Biostar TZ77A
Ram: 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws 1600
GPU: HIS R9 270 iPower IceQ X²
PSU CX600

I want to upgrade my R9 270 to a R9 290, The CX series is a decent unit, But I am afraid to attempt this because of the wattage, and the fact that it will be pulling close to max capacity. And I am not sure it is a good idea to run a PSU near max with lower quality caps. What do you think? Would my CX600 be fine running a R9 290? Or should I forget it?

[mariushm]

Re: PSU question

The cx600 should be plenty powerful for that system, it's decent enough.

Not sure what you mean by close to max capacity, the r9 290 uses about 275 watts and has peaks to 330w for very short periods of time. The rest of your system won't use more than 100 watts, so you won't see more than 350-400w probably 95% of the time when you play games.

[BlairR9270]

Re: PSU question

Thanks, That will save me a bit of cash getting the R9 290 instead of the GTX 970.
And do they really go to 90c? or is that just a Nvidia fanboy rant? It will be going in a pretty well ventilated Antec 300 case.

[mariushm]

Re: PSU question

I have a Radeon 7770 Ghz edition and my previous card was a Radeon 4850, so I'm not really a nVidia fan (i had nvidia, s3, ati cards etc, not biased).

Older cards like Radeon 48xx, 58xx, 78xx were "tuned" to adjust fan rotation speed and frequencies so that the temperature would stay high during operation, at around 75-90c.
The chips could handle this high temperature for long periods of times without any problems, and keeping the chip at higher temperature actually helps achieve higher performance with less power wasted (more efficiency).

I'm not up to date with the most recent video card models, i simply didn't read the reviews and technical information about the latest processors, so the temperatures could be slightly lower on the newer cards... but still, seeing 60-80c on these cards is really not an issue. everything on the cards can handle such high temperatures.