doveman wrote:Will this be sufficient for a PII X3 710 with 2 4830 or 4850 cards?
I think the 4850 draws about 110w at load, so assuming the 710 draws around 100W, that's 320w/26A. I think that should leave enough headroom for a couple of HDs, a DVD drive and the MB but I wanted to check before I buy it. What would the 710 draw if overclocked to say 3.2ghz?
In reality, I'll probably only be running one 4830 or 4850 but I'm trying to buy components that will give me some options if I'm blessed with some extra cash or get bored and want to start tweaking
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Well for starters, the Phenom 2 tri-core does not use 100w. Its rated for 95w, which is the same as its 4-core brothers. So presuming that they would run at 80-90w under realistic load, this chip with 1 core disabled will likely pull at most 75w.
So lets say you buy a second 4850 (which do indeed peak at 100-110w), and decide to spend all afternoon running multiple simultaneous benchmarks (because that is the only thing that will get your CPU and both GPU's running at absolute max), you'll still have over 100w of headroom.
Under gaming you'll probably stay around 250-300w actual usage for the whole system.
the fan on the nexus ramps up quite a bit between 150 and 200w, however how often do you need it to be absolutely silent (compared with just really quiet) while gaming? when idling/light usage is when you need fans to be really quiet, and you could build a 4850 CF system that idles below 150w.