Maximum PC

Im currently waiting on parts for a pc im building, heres a link to everything i bought http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Publi ... r=19165372

I was thinking about ordering a second 560ti to run in SLI, but i have a feeling my PSU will be inadequate with that hardware, especially if i overclock the 2500k.

using newegg and asus's psu wattage calculator, it said 750W minimum, but thats both at stock clocks, and i intended on at the very least OCing my 2500k to around 4.0ghz.

would the 750W corsair psu be enough to handle the cards in sli? what about with an overclocked cpu?

You should be OK. Suggested ratings take into consideration that most people have no clue how to build a computer or how important quality products are, so, most people order "junk" low quality power supplies because they want to save money.

Many companies list power output as "peak" wattage, those are the low quality power supplies, a good power supply will list wattage as continuous, which is what the listed Corsair is.

The power supply you listed is a high quality PSU.

thats great news, because i was panicking because i thought i made a mistake, that would cost me time and money lol.

im glad i splurged on a better psu for my first build.

oddly enough, i went on corsairs website and used their psu finder, and selected 560ti in sli and an i5 with a mild overclock, and it suggested a 650w or the 750w psu, which i found really odd because i thought id barely get by with the 750

Power supply "requirements" on video cards is just to cover the manufacturer's ass and assume the worst possible scenario. I have a Core i5-2500 with two GTX 560 Ti's, and the thing barely trips over 300W when I run a heavy lifting game.

ive been getting my figures from guru3ds power consumption tests, like they said under full load an i5 OC to 4.2 or 4.5ghz used 180W, and the 560s in sli used 450W, so thats 630W in full stress, leaving me with 120W for everything else, but now that i think about it, how often is everything going to be in 100% stress, as long as i dont oc my video cards, i guess ill be fine.
one thing i dont understand is how they got a power consumption for 1 560 ti for 319W, yet two only hit 450W, wouldnt it be at 638W?

maybe im reading it wrong, heres the links to where im getting my info:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-g ... i-review/7
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-g ... -review/14

whats a good stress test alternative to furmark? supposedly it makes graphics cards draw more power then they should, and id like something that will let me check to see that everything is running properly without being as intensive as i guess furmark is.

As I suspected, you are not looking at the video card power consumtion, you are looking at SYSTEM power consumption in Watts:

One video card:
System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 319W

Two video cards:
System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 449W

Pay attention to what you are reading.

And, they are not telling what they used for the test, other than they are NOT using FurMark.

Furmark maxes out the video card, but only to the video cards' limits. There are power control circuitry that gets tripped when Furmark runs, at least what Anandtech found out. While I would plan for the worst case scenario, do measurements on more realistic applications such as a game (Crysis 2 or Battlefield 3 on Ultra settings perhaps).

I used to use FurMark, and am familiar with it. However, these days it is good for tweeking a video card when it gets close to an overclock going too far, that is, will not last a long time.

I have also found that on many video cards it does little to overclock, at least very much. Why overclock when you will get an extra 3 to 5 frames per second when an un-overclocked video card averages 65 frames per second in the same instance. It is simply not worth it.

Games will not push a video card as hard as a program dedicated to simply tasking the video card to max performance. In other words, if games do not get your video card too hot or cause other problems, I have learned to leave things alone, and I have been overclocking for decades.

There's also the fact that if you're already pushing past 60FPS average, there's no point in going further since your LCD isn't going to push those extra frames out in full.

FWIW I run an ASUS P8P67 Deluxe MB, 2600K OCed to 4.5ghz, 2 560ti video cards, a sound blaster, 7 mechanical hard drives, a RevoDrive and an OCZ 120GB SSD on a Corsair 750 W modular PS. Have never had even a hiccup.