different makers of vid cards

[guncrasher]

lawn buying a power supply that is well above what you need is actually not a good idea.  I cant remember why but skuzzy and others have been recommending against it for years.  for your system you need probably no more than 1000w and I think that's even way more than what you need.

midway

[Bizman]

The "why" was that the unneeded power will do less funny things. A little headroom is a good thing, but doubling what you need isn't.

This calculator gives a rough idea of how much your components use, it also can count aging effect on your PSU.

[Skuzzy]

Switching power supplies deliver the best (cleanest) power when they are between 75 and 80 percent load.

Under reduced loads power supplies cannot come close to their efficiency rating.  They run hotter.  The produce far dirtier power which also causes other analog components (hard drives, burners,...) to die sooner.  They cause fans to run noisier.  All motors run hotter.  This is due to the power having spikes in it which are not converted to motive power, but simply cause more heat to be generated in the copper windings.

If the motherboard does not have sufficient filtering for the power, then the components on the motherboard will also run hotter and premature failures can result.


If the loads on the power supply exceed 85% to 90%, the same problem occurs, but with with accelerated results as the supply cannot generate enough internal power to filter the output well enough.


If your computer is suffering from stability issues, and/or component failures, then you probably need to look no further than your power supply as the cause.


Right now, Seasonic is making the best power supplies available.  They also make all the best supplies available from Corsair, Thermaltake, and many other companies.

[Dogtown]

thanks guys...power supply was gonna be my next question .....

[BaldEagl]

Dogtown are you building new from scratch or updating a current machine?

I ask because the key to getting everything you can out of your machine is to retain balance between components.  You can buy the greatest video card out there but if your CPU's not up to the task it won't provide any benefit.  The key is to spend wisely so all your components run at maximum effective rates without bottlenecks.  Why buy ultra-fast RAM if it has to wait for the CPU to respond (in fact that specific case can actually degrade performance)?

Read, read, read.  Research, research, research.  What you need to understand is effective clock rates (CPU, RAM, GPU, Bus speeds, etc.) to make sure data keeps flowing without inturruption between components.  Effective clock rates can be much different that published clock rates (i.e. DDR2 = dual data rate effectively doubling the published clock rate).  As soon as there's a disruption in the data flow, like a gridlocked airport, the entire system slows down.

Whatever you don't understand Google.  Read various opinions until you feel you've got it.  When I built my machine I did that for three months before I ever started selecting components.  Now 4 1/2 years later I'm still running steady 59 fps with most graphic settings at maximum.

One last note:  If you're upgrading a current system you could go overboard on a component thinking you'll use it in a future build but at the speed technology changes it's more likely todays buy will be obsolete tomorrow.

[Dogtown]

No not a build ...not looking at real high end stuff ...maybe ASUS ENGTX 560ti dcll / top/2dl 1gd GeForceGTX 560 ti (fermi) 1gb 256 gddr5