PSU Wattage Help

[slayerv29]

Thinking of buying a Corsair CX 750W psu, I like its low price and 5 year warranty. I've gone through a few calculators thermaltake, newegg (which was terrible compared to the others), msi, and extreme and I've gotten 690W to 799W. Not sure what power supply to get? This is my first build and don't know a reliable calculator, I want a bronze lvl psu with a minimum 5 year warranty. Also I don't intend to buy the second graphics cards right away rather over a period of time I will along with the storage hard drive, will that matter?

My build:

Thermaltake lvl 10 GT

MSI Mpower Mobo

Intel 3770K (Gonna OC to 4.6 ghz)

16 (8x2) GB Corsair Vengeance

2x MSI 660 ti PE (gonna over volt not sure how much the maximum is for it)

dvd combo drive

120 gb SSD Corsair Neutron

1 TB Hard Drive (not ssd)

Corsair H100i

[christoi]

A ~750w unit would probably be your best bet with overclocking in mind, just make sure it's a high quality unit. As for adding the second card later on, running a power supply at lower loads will not have any negative impact on the performance, except for lower efficiency so you would be fine there.

[Dave :)]

Could easily use a 550-650W psu, possibly less, but i would suggest one of These. If your budget is lower, then one of These Would also be a good buy.

[the_devil52]

If you're adding another card it's better to get a power supply with enough wattage for both of them right away rather than upgrading your PSU when you buy the second card. For two overclocked 660 ti's I would recommend a minimum of a good 80 plus gold 650W PSU but I reckon that just to be on the safe side you should probably get a 750W PSU

[Emkryan]

If you can, since you have a single gpu setup, you can get away with 550 watts. My advice is either a decent (bronze) 750 or Platinum 550.

[Guest]

The different 80Plus rating in my opinion is a waste. Don't get me wrong; 80Plus is a good thing however I believe and calculations have shown the purchase difference between 80Plus bronze and 80Plus gold are often more than the money you are saved over a 3 year period. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/09/15/80_plus_irrelevant_to_you_when_buying_psu/2

However, back to the original question. You could get away with an 80Plus 650w however to be on the safe side, I would go with a 750w. My personal two preferences for those are the Corsair AX/AXi 750w - they cost somewhere in the order of $200-$250, are fully modular and from memory Gold and Platinum not that that actually means much. For a more restricted budget, for me locally they're about $150 but you can get them cheaper in the States. Silverstone Strider Plus; comes fully modular with very good build quality considering its price point. I personally would replace the 24, 8CPU and PCI power cables or individually sleeve them myself if I wanted perfection because like most PSU's under $200, the sleeving isn't amazing.

[zapashark]

Don't get SLIed 660 Tis. Get a GTX 680 4 GB instead- great performance, but less glitchy. It will also handle Anti-Aliasing and antistropic filtering better because of the higher memory bandwidth. It will also match your mobo. Alternatively, for OCing, get a 7970 lightning. Same things as above, higher frame rates, and better overclocking. But you give up PhysX and Adaptive-Vsync.

[killerx525]

And for the 7970, has a even larger memory bandwidth.

[Col]

Will be the go in my opinion , plenty power for your setup

[Electronics Wizardy]

750 will be enough and be in the 50 - 75% area of best efficiency for power supplies. 500 seems a little small for sli and over clocking as the cpu will use 100 watts and the gpu's will use 150 each and other stuff will use about 50 -100 watts so a 550 will work but barely.