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MSI AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Power Consumption Linus Tech Tips

2010-10-21
power consumptions always a big one so you can see my system with the Radeon 68 70 calls about 300 watts from the wall when I've got it under a full fir mark load now what we might want to do just for comparison's sake is fire up prime95 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 four gigs of ram quad core this is an 8 7 5 K processor overclocked and then a stock speed 68 70 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 systems gonna be a little bit different but ok so hold on let me do some quick math here so about 90 percent so we're probably pulling about 360 watts from the power supply right now ok as soon as you start adding more drives and stuff you might see that bun jump up to about 400 watts so 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 58 70 as you can see is quite a bit higher than the 68 70 now it is a faster card but I don't think it's well I guess it's pretty proportional remember the 58 70 and the 68 70 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 diocese 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 fir mark with prime95 running so with for this card yeah you'd need another 50 to 75 watts of available power and your power supply remembering that if you're me you're you overbuying 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 percent load with prime95 and fur mark 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 watts so if you had a 500 watt power supply with a GTX 480 at 3.8 gigahertz overclock quad and SSD blah blah blah etc about this build then you'd be stressing it to the max when you're under extreme load that fans gonna 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 because it'll also give you 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 yeah even that's I guess that's fine for any 50 watt 80 plus silver power supply should be alright but ideally as I said before you want your power supply doing about 50 60 % duty maybe 75 percent under a night you know an extreme load scenario like affirm are not a 5 I mean how often are you you know rendering video with 4 corners while you gain you know so so 75 percent load is probably what I would target to ensure that 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 58 70 and the brand new radeon 68 17
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