PSU: 380/390 + i5

Alumicard · November 2015

My current PSU is kind of broken (sounds like a jet engine) and because I want to upgrade my box at christmas anyway I thought about getting a new PSU right now. Like the title says I'm going for a 380/90 and i5 but not sure which exact CPU yet.
I read that the GPU takes about 200-250w max but because those are manufacturer numbers I'm not quite sure if those are true. Same for the 150-200w CPU.

Does anyone have a box like that and knows if 500watt are enough or is it better to go for 550/600w? The difference between those is 50 bucks which I could spend on a better CPU so Im curious.

Thx for any help in advance.

stayontarget · November 2015

I always like to go a little higher than i needed, but not way over. A good 650w psu will give you enough headroom for future addons.

Asm0deus · November 2015

I wouldn't go any lower than this:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151121&_ga=1.230431388.181523421.1441405085

Gdemami · November 2015

Do yourself a favour, ignore local AMD bias and get an GTX 970.

For R9 290/390 you would need +600W power supply. The card can draw +300W alone and you want some headroom, PSU power output degradates with time.

For the CPU, you want to avoid overclockable "K" series, they are terribly price inefficient so you want i5-6400/6500.

Godeau · November 2015

If you're just going to use this pc purely for gaming, just get the i5-6400 or 6500. Personally, I would go for the 6500 as the price difference between the 2 isn't that far off, and the 6500 has 500Mhz more at base clock.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/88188,88184,88185

Get a psu with more headroom.
As Gdemami has pointed out, a psu output degrades over time due to heat and prolonged usage, but the degradation is very slow. Not only that, a psu is most efficient at around 55-60%; having a psu rating that fits just right to your power draw will be stressing it at max.
(If you have read gpu reviews at guru3d, you would have probably noticed that they recommend psu well above their total system power draw.)

Some food for thought, it is unwise to skimp on a psu just because you want to save on money; the psu is one of the, if not the most crucial component in the pc. If unlucky, a cheap crappy psu, if blown could take out the rest of your components(happened to me once).

Cyberchuck · November 2015

I got 5820k and R9 390 and my UPS does not show on display consumption higher that 25% of it maximum capability - 1200W. I presume that during high load overall system will required ~700W.

I have bought 1200W PSU so I don't care though...

Malabooga · November 2015

500 is quite enough. 390 oced peaks at around 250 w (380 at 175w) and skylake i5-6600k (non oced) uses 64w.

thats 310. Add 50 for everything else (2-5w/ssd/hdd, 2w for every fan, 5w for every memory stick) that would add a peak of 360w. And you have headroom for OC.

I would suggest this one though (550 is just 1$ cheaper on newegg, if you dont want from newegg check out both 550 and 650w price, both are fine):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207014

or this one for modular:

http://xfxforce.com/en-us/products/xtr-series-gold-full-modular/xtr-series-550w-psu-p1-550b-befx

This is very useful link:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-2547993/psu-tier-list.html

T1 and T2 are recommended, T3 can pass.

Quizzical · November 2015

Alumicard said:

My current PSU is kind of broken (sounds like a jet engine) and because I want to upgrade my box at christmas anyway I thought about getting a new PSU right now. Like the title says I'm going for a 380/90 and i5 but not sure which exact CPU yet.
I read that the GPU takes about 200-250w max but because those are manufacturer numbers I'm not quite sure if those are true. Same for the 150-200w CPU.

Does anyone have a box like that and knows if 500watt are enough or is it better to go for 550/600w? The difference between those is 50 bucks which I could spend on a better CPU so Im curious.

Thx for any help in advance.

The difference in price between a 500 W and 650 W power supply of comparable quality tends to be about $10 or $20 or so. If you're looking at higher end video cards, I'd typically get something in the ballpark of 650 W, just to make sure it's fine not only for the card you buy now, but also for future upgrades.

This one is a really great deal today at $70 before a $10 rebate:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151118

In fact, it's such a great deal that I expect that price to go up within days if not hours.

If you're really, really trying to save money on a power supply, you could get by with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438014

I wouldn't, though. Not with the Seasonic available for that cheap.

[Deleted User] · November 2015

The user and all related content has been deleted.

rojoArcueid · November 2015

Gdemami said:

Do yourself a favour, ignore local AMD bias and get an GTX 970.

For R9 290/390 you would need +600W power supply. The card can draw +300W alone and you want some headroom, PSU power output degradates with time.

For the CPU, you want to avoid overclockable "K" series, they are terribly price inefficient so you want i5-6400/6500.

isnt the GTX 970 infamous for using only 3.5GB out of the 4GB it has on the label? I was considering the 970 over the R9 390 but i rather get the latter with 8GB for the same price and its a little bit faster. NVIDIA was kind of shady with the 970 and their reasoning behind it only using 3.5GB was that it had a second partition with the extra 0.5GB

Malabooga · November 2015

rojoArcueid said:

Gdemami said:

Do yourself a favour, ignore local AMD bias and get an GTX 970.

For R9 290/390 you would need +600W power supply. The card can draw +300W alone and you want some headroom, PSU power output degradates with time.

For the CPU, you want to avoid overclockable "K" series, they are terribly price inefficient so you want i5-6400/6500.

isnt the GTX 970 infamous for using only 3.5GB out of the 4GB it has on the label? I was considering the 970 over the R9 390 but i rather get the latter with 8GB for the same price and its a little bit faster. NVIDIA was kind of shady with the 970 and their reasoning behind it only using 3.5GB was that it had a second partition with the extra 0.5GB

And the added bonus that AMD (by tests so far) performs much better in dx12, so much that NVidia sent cheat sheat to developers which dx12 features NOT to use.

Malabooga · November 2015

Quizzical said:

Alumicard said:

My current PSU is kind of broken (sounds like a jet engine) and because I want to upgrade my box at christmas anyway I thought about getting a new PSU right now. Like the title says I'm going for a 380/90 and i5 but not sure which exact CPU yet.
I read that the GPU takes about 200-250w max but because those are manufacturer numbers I'm not quite sure if those are true. Same for the 150-200w CPU.

Does anyone have a box like that and knows if 500watt are enough or is it better to go for 550/600w? The difference between those is 50 bucks which I could spend on a better CPU so Im curious.

Thx for any help in advance.

The difference in price between a 500 W and 650 W power supply of comparable quality tends to be about $10 or $20 or so. If you're looking at higher end video cards, I'd typically get something in the ballpark of 650 W, just to make sure it's fine not only for the card you buy now, but also for future upgrades.

This one is a really great deal today at $70 before a $10 rebate:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151118

In fact, it's such a great deal that I expect that price to go up within days if not hours.

If you're really, really trying to save money on a power supply, you could get by with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438014

I wouldn't, though. Not with the Seasonic available for that cheap.

It says 100$ already.

And why would he go that EVGA when he can get Seasonic.....i mean....XFX (which is seasonic) for same price?

Quizzical · November 2015

I figured that deal was too good to last long. Anyway, my next proposal would be to grab this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207034

At the moment, that's $80 before a $35 rebate.

Alumicard · November 2015

First of all thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially for mentioning the i5-6500 because I dismissed the whole Skylake family from the start because they are new and I thought they were too expansive but €200 is within the budget.

Two follow up questions:
1) Is the AMD Athlon X4 860K a good alternative to the 6500? It takes a bit more power but is less than half the price and seems to have the same computing power. Just asking because I could upgrade the GPU if that is a decent replacement for the i5-6500 and who doesn't like more GPU power?

2) At 1GPU and 1 dual 16gb ram module (2x 8gb DDR4 2133) is there a reason to get a board using H170 over a H110 one?

Back to the PSU topic. I ordered the XFX P1-650G-TS3X. Thanks for pointing that one out. The reviews were great and it is quite a lot cheaper than other 650w units with equally good reviews. Especially sound and cable length+flexibility (good for airflow).

I appreciate you guys took the time for the links to newegg but sadly I can't use the rebates in the EU. Which is annoying because $45 is a really good price for that thing compared to €75ish.

About the Nvidia 970. I think that it's a good card but I don't like what Nvidia did with the card. So I'm going with AMD for personal reasons and not because the card is bad, just to clear this up. It will probably be a 380 because I'm fine with 1080/1440p at OK fps on high settings. Besides both the 970 and 390 would put me over my €700 mark if there is no AMD alternative for the CPU. Unless I can convince my kids to forget about Christmas then I could get a Fury and... well that won't happen.

Well, that went quite a bit off topic but again thank you very much for the help and maybe someone can help me with the H110 vs H170 thing and maybe even point out an AMD alternative.

You guys are great

Malabooga · November 2015

Well, if you go AMD its either FX-63xx or FX-83xx. I suggest 6300 or 8300 and overclock since its same exact chips as 6350 and 8350 and overclocking to those nubers is very easy, most dont even reuquire voltage adjustement.

and this board:

http://www.gigabyte.com.hr/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5194#ov

its cheapest board with 8+2 VRM so you dont ever have to worry about thorttling wile OCing (not huge OCs though youll need 990FX-ud3 or ud5 for monster overclocks)

And decent CPU cooler is advised something like coolermaster hyper 212 EVO (advised for intel also)

and definitely 650w PSU.

Id personally go for AMD FX-8300. i5-6500 just seems too low on clocks. Thats me though, i dont even recognize non -k Intels ;P

But it really depends what you play, if you play couple of games (usually with borked engine) like ARMA 3, youll need fast intel (fast on clocks), i see no noticable difference in SWTOR between my OCed 8300 and Intels (where game performs badly it performs badly for everyone, Intel may pull couple of FPS more but 18 or 20 FPS, does it really matter, where game performs good it peforms good for everyone, its engine thingy)

In new games i havent seen much difference between FX-8350 and Intel i5, especially for a GPU like 380.

Heres some interesting tests:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Systems/Quad-Core-Gaming-Roundup-How-Much-CPU-Do-You-Really-Need

to help you decide.

You may asko yourself "why not i3". If you check multi threaded game results like metro last night youll see why FX-8300(8350) is much better option, and more and more games will be able to use more cores.

Theres this also http://wccftech.com/witcher-3-cpu-benchmarks-fx-63008350-i7-4790ki5-4690ki3-4130g3258-oc/

interesting part is when he enters the city (which actually requires some CPU juice)

You wont go wrong with CPU, but difference of going i5 over FX-6300 is pretty much going 380 over 390 (where i live)

FX-6300/8300 with 390 is much better deal than i5 with 380 in my book.

Gdemami · November 2015

Alumicard said:

First of all thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially for mentioning the i5-6500 because I dismissed the whole Skylake family from the start because they are new and I thought they were too expansive but €200 is within the budget.

Two follow up questions:
1) Is the AMD Athlon X4 860K a good alternative to the 6500? It takes a bit more power but is less than half the price and seems to have the same computing power. Just asking because I could upgrade the GPU if that is a decent replacement for the i5-6500 and who doesn't like more GPU power?

2) At 1GPU and 1 dual 16gb ram module (2x 8gb DDR4 2133) is there a reason to get a board using H170 over a H110 one?

Back to the PSU topic. I ordered the XFX P1-650G-TS3X. Thanks for pointing that one out. The reviews were great and it is quite a lot cheaper than other 650w units with equally good reviews. Especially sound and cable length+flexibility (good for airflow).

I appreciate you guys took the time for the links to newegg but sadly I can't use the rebates in the EU. Which is annoying because $45 is a really good price for that thing compared to €75ish.

About the Nvidia 970. I think that it's a good card but I don't like what Nvidia did with the card. So I'm going with AMD for personal reasons and not because the card is bad, just to clear this up. It will probably be a 380 because I'm fine with 1080/1440p at OK fps on high settings. Besides both the 970 and 390 would put me over my €700 mark if there is no AMD alternative for the CPU. Unless I can convince my kids to forget about Christmas then I could get a Fury and... well that won't happen.

Well, that went quite a bit off topic but again thank you very much for the help and maybe someone can help me with the H110 vs H170 thing and maybe even point out an AMD alternative.

You guys are great

1) X4 860k is not an alternative to i5 by any stretch. AMD does not have competitive desktop CPUs apart from APU segment. FX series had very hard time competing with Haswell i3 and Skylake brought even more power to i3 product line.

2) 16GB is plentiful and more than likely enough for the entire motherboard life span. H170 is mostly just about those 4 memory slots, H110 will do just fine.

DDR4 does not seem to be worthy getting from perfromance/price point of view but it is a newer tech. So I guess it is up to you.

I think you should get within €700 with GTX 970, pity you bought that 650W supply though.

Quizzical · November 2015

Alumicard said:

First of all thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially for mentioning the i5-6500 because I dismissed the whole Skylake family from the start because they are new and I thought they were too expansive but €200 is within the budget.

Two follow up questions:
1) Is the AMD Athlon X4 860K a good alternative to the 6500? It takes a bit more power but is less than half the price and seems to have the same computing power. Just asking because I could upgrade the GPU if that is a decent replacement for the i5-6500 and who doesn't like more GPU power?

2) At 1GPU and 1 dual 16gb ram module (2x 8gb DDR4 2133) is there a reason to get a board using H170 over a H110 one?

Back to the PSU topic. I ordered the XFX P1-650G-TS3X. Thanks for pointing that one out. The reviews were great and it is quite a lot cheaper than other 650w units with equally good reviews. Especially sound and cable length+flexibility (good for airflow).

I appreciate you guys took the time for the links to newegg but sadly I can't use the rebates in the EU. Which is annoying because $45 is a really good price for that thing compared to €75ish.

About the Nvidia 970. I think that it's a good card but I don't like what Nvidia did with the card. So I'm going with AMD for personal reasons and not because the card is bad, just to clear this up. It will probably be a 380 because I'm fine with 1080/1440p at OK fps on high settings. Besides both the 970 and 390 would put me over my €700 mark if there is no AMD alternative for the CPU. Unless I can convince my kids to forget about Christmas then I could get a Fury and... well that won't happen.

Well, that went quite a bit off topic but again thank you very much for the help and maybe someone can help me with the H110 vs H170 thing and maybe even point out an AMD alternative.

You guys are great

On your budget, there's no real reason to consider an AMD CPU. The problem is that, at the same clock speed, a modern Intel Core-whatever CPU core will perform a lot better than an AMD CPU core. If you were on a much tighter budget where you really have to cut back somewhere, getting an AMD CPU rather than Intel can free up enough budget to avoid some rather painful cuts elsewhere in the build. But that's not your situation.

I would advise against getting a Core i5-6500. Get a Core i5-4690 or a Core i5-6600 or better. A Core i5-6500 is barely any faster than a Core i5-3570 that you could have bought 3 years ago for essentially the same price.

If you're not in the US, which sites can you buy from? Often, several products are basically equivalent, and the sensible thing to do is buy the one that is cheapest that day. What's cheapest in the US isn't necessarily cheapest on the sites you can buy from.

Quizzical · November 2015

Actually, let's back up a moment. What hardware do you have now? CPUs haven't been improving very fast in the last several years, so there might not be any sense in upgrading what you already have.

Malabooga · November 2015

Quizzical said:

Alumicard said:

First of all thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially for mentioning the i5-6500 because I dismissed the whole Skylake family from the start because they are new and I thought they were too expansive but €200 is within the budget.

Two follow up questions:
1) Is the AMD Athlon X4 860K a good alternative to the 6500? It takes a bit more power but is less than half the price and seems to have the same computing power. Just asking because I could upgrade the GPU if that is a decent replacement for the i5-6500 and who doesn't like more GPU power?

2) At 1GPU and 1 dual 16gb ram module (2x 8gb DDR4 2133) is there a reason to get a board using H170 over a H110 one?

Back to the PSU topic. I ordered the XFX P1-650G-TS3X. Thanks for pointing that one out. The reviews were great and it is quite a lot cheaper than other 650w units with equally good reviews. Especially sound and cable length+flexibility (good for airflow).

I appreciate you guys took the time for the links to newegg but sadly I can't use the rebates in the EU. Which is annoying because $45 is a really good price for that thing compared to €75ish.

About the Nvidia 970. I think that it's a good card but I don't like what Nvidia did with the card. So I'm going with AMD for personal reasons and not because the card is bad, just to clear this up. It will probably be a 380 because I'm fine with 1080/1440p at OK fps on high settings. Besides both the 970 and 390 would put me over my €700 mark if there is no AMD alternative for the CPU. Unless I can convince my kids to forget about Christmas then I could get a Fury and... well that won't happen.

Well, that went quite a bit off topic but again thank you very much for the help and maybe someone can help me with the H110 vs H170 thing and maybe even point out an AMD alternative.

You guys are great

On your budget, there's no real reason to consider an AMD CPU. The problem is that, at the same clock speed, a modern Intel Core-whatever CPU core will perform a lot better than an AMD CPU core. If you were on a much tighter budget where you really have to cut back somewhere, getting an AMD CPU rather than Intel can free up enough budget to avoid some rather painful cuts elsewhere in the build. But that's not your situation.

I would advise against getting a Core i5-6500. Get a Core i5-4690 or a Core i5-6600 or better. A Core i5-6500 is barely any faster than a Core i5-3570 that you could have bought 3 years ago for essentially the same price.

If you're not in the US, which sites can you buy from? Often, several products are basically equivalent, and the sensible thing to do is buy the one that is cheapest that day. What's cheapest in the US isn't necessarily cheapest on the sites you can buy from.

Tell me the difference between CPUs on r9380 (pretty much 280)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Systems/Quad-Core-Gaming-Roundup-How-Much-CPU-Do-You-Really-Need

Then tell me difference between i5+280 (380) and FX-8350+290x (390)

-------------------------------

But i agree, what hardware do you have, if you have AMD platform you might be able to stick FX in your existing mobo (for instance)

Godeau · November 2015

Alumicard said:

First of all thank you very much for all the feedback. Especially for mentioning the i5-6500 because I dismissed the whole Skylake family from the start because they are new and I thought they were too expansive but €200 is within the budget.

Two follow up questions:
1) Is the AMD Athlon X4 860K a good alternative to the 6500? It takes a bit more power but is less than half the price and seems to have the same computing power. Just asking because I could upgrade the GPU if that is a decent replacement for the i5-6500 and who doesn't like more GPU power?

2) At 1GPU and 1 dual 16gb ram module (2x 8gb DDR4 2133) is there a reason to get a board using H170 over a H110 one?

1. I would skip the x4 860K unless you are really tight on budget; it is barely even competing with an intel Pentium G3258
http://www.techspot.com/review/1017-best-budget-gaming-cpu/page6.html

2. H110 or H170? It really depends on the features that you want, I would suggest taking a look at the boards from their respective brands for the amount of ram slots, sata ports, I/O ports etc plus other additonal features, and decide from there

Godeau · November 2015

Quizzical said:
On your budget, there's no real reason to consider an AMD CPU. The problem is that, at the same clock speed, a modern Intel Core-whatever CPU core will perform a lot better than an AMD CPU core. If you were on a much tighter budget where you really have to cut back somewhere, getting an AMD CPU rather than Intel can free up enough budget to avoid some rather painful cuts elsewhere in the build. But that's not your situation.

I would advise against getting a Core i5-6500. Get a Core i5-4690 or a Core i5-6600 or better. A Core i5-6500 is barely any faster than a Core i5-3570 that you could have bought 3 years ago for essentially the same price.

Ahh, you brought up some points that I have overlooked and missed entirely. Thank you.
I had forgotten that the cpu gains hasn't been improving much since sandy bridge days. Myself, I am still trucking a 3 year old 3570k and I have another which is on a 2500k. All I have been doing up till now are just gpu upgrades.

I too would like to see what the topic starter has for his current build.

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PSU: 380/390 + i5

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