Have a look at the Seasonic S12II-380 then. You should be able to get it for like 55 € and it's of high quality and very silent. When talking about noise: Don't "give a shit" about the vendor advertisments concerning the noise. There's no standard to measure that and so you can create any fantasy value you want. That way the entire concept of dB values is pretty much nonsene and probably the reason you won't have seen a "non-silent" PSU or fan. You really have to rely on tests to have any idea of the actual noise...


You of course still have to reduce that measured value a bit because it includes the PSU's inefficency which pretty much lowers the value for like 25% for older ones...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

I racently had the 8pin plug issue with a new motherboard.
But on reading the manual is said the "second" four pins were optional.
(footnote: Im a computer tech so I know I understood correctly)
(the second two lines are only to 'help' balance the load on the 12V rails)

The standard 4pin-12V plug fits the first 4 pins of the MB socket.
Ive been running my AMD6400+ like this from a 550W Power supply for
two months without any voltage, heating, or behaviour issues.

If you can track a manual for your motherboard it may be the same for you...

When you buy a PSU with such a low dollar value, then you are
going to have to pay extra for the "feature" of modular cables.

So buy the cheapest PSU with modular cables you can, (lostclimate's link looks good)
OR Live with the clutter (hidden inside a cd-drive bay like me),
OR chop the excess cables off with a pair of pliers... <<<< sarcasm

Dont laugh at the last one. I have seen it done by so-called "professional" businesses.<<<< NOT sarcasm

You should be very careful in assuming a powerful system won't ever get within the 500Watt range. In fact, my previous PC with a single GPU, powerful Core 2 Duo and a bunch of hard drives would bail (as in: shut down) on a 450Watt power supply the very moment anything more than idle power consumption happened.

I would stay within the 500-750Watt zone to be safe, even if it means spending a bit more. It will greatly improve overall system stability if you don't run close to your power supplies limits every time your system has to do a bit more than in idle situations.



I wouldn't recommend doing that, as that's like begging for trouble.

I'd agree with phemox, dont try and hit the mark perfectly because "perfect estimations" are self-contradictory. I'd go a little bit over just in case. That said, Phemox, a lot of hard drives are a big killer in what you have so keep that in mind.

Yes, you're totally right. It's very easy to underestimate hard drive power consumption when everybody is talking about how GPUs are energy hungry.

Well it's never bad to keep some distance to a PSU's limit but your recommendation of 500-750 watts (!) for ventilator's system is totally off the scale. You'd have to recommend 800+ watts for someone with a really decent graphics card and SLI wouldn't start below 1000 watts when you choose such a high range to recommend...

All you need to make sure is to buy a quality PSU though: You of course will have experiences of "not enough" watts when buying like a 500 watts PSU from LCPower which will die when delivering something around 350 watts (Planet3DNow "loves" reviewing them ^^). If you do so you can even power a High-End Single-GPU gamestation with something around 400 watts. I myself e.g. run a Phenom 9850 with a HD4870 and the usual stuff with a 420 watts PSU and that only because the 380 watts version was out of stock when I bought it...

The point about hard-drive power consumption has some truth to it but you have to keep things in perspecitve - HDDs still drain little in comparison to a GPU. I'd use 10 watts as a guide for standard HDD power consumption. If you use some high-speed server HDDs then this might go up to like 15 watts each. So yeah if you have like 6 HDDs in your PC that's definitely a fact you should consider...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

just get a 1000 watter and be done with it!

Oh come on, it has nothing to do with 'scales'.

Believe it or not but most SLI and Crossfire systems won't freaking run without around 750Watt power supplies.

But by all means go ahead and be stubborn about it.

I'd have to disagree there, my sli system ran on a 300watt power supply for a good 7 months (and still works) before I decided I should probably change it out for my 585w. (of course this wasnt a good idea) I'm not sure about crossfire though.