General computer talk/advice

I'd totally buy the 970 (it's like £10 more than the standard one), but green looks awful with gold (z97 board).
And I'm most likely buying a case with red LEDs (CM K350), so red build it is.

Also, being a limited edition it'll probably be out of stock by the time I can afford it in about a month.

I want the backplate tho

 

whats the differnce between that and a normal one?

 

The normal one is red, the gold edition is green and has a backplate, it may also be clocked a bit higher but due to gpu boost it really doesn't matter.

Im tempted to buy a backplate for my 970 to see if it helps to prevent the electrical noise from the card interfering with the audio input on my sound card. Not that the issue is really that bad, its barely audible

 

The gold edition is, um, gold :|
It also has an all copper heatsink.

The green one is the 100ME (100 million edition).

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So according to Steam, the most popular GPU is Intel HD 4000. It's sad.

 

what would be a good psu to power a GTX970 i totally forgot to check mine before i bought the 970 and i dont think it will have nuff power

 

What power supply do you have. A decent 500w PSU will be enough.

 

idk it good nuff to a power a I73770k and 16 gb ram and 2tb

 

You still haven't said what power supply you have.

Just use this to work it out: http://www.enermax.outervision.com/

You will probably be quite surprised at how little power your pc will actually take. I am running both a 970 and 560ti in a 600w psu system with many add in cards etc. 500w will probably be fine as long as it is a decent brand.

 

it says reccomended 295W i dont think thats right i thinks it about 400w because i left some stuff black because idk what it is

 

If it says recommended 295w then you probably shouldn't exceed that too much. Nvidia claims that you need at least a 500w psu to use the 970, in reality you could get away with quite a bit less, that is just nvidia covering themselves, Get something like a corsair cx500 if you want something fairly cheap by an ok brand.

 

yea but that was without some stuff on the calculator and some bit were prolly wrong


i just used a torch to look in my pc adn the only sticker one the power thingy is HI-POTAK wtf is that?

also i have a msi board are they good?

 

A decent 600W PSU (80+ Bronze rated or better) should be enough for a 3770K and a GTX 970. Don't go below that or you'll have close to no upgrade headroom.
I have a non-80+ 700W PSU (efficiency is rated at about 75%), which means it outputs ~520W at peak load. It's enough to power a 4690K and an R9 270 (which actually uses more power than a GTX 970). According to PSU calculators my PC needs a 400W PSU, 450 recommended.

 

i wont be upgrading any more so ill just stick with the stock one onn my pc if it is enough to power the 970

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this is the model

advent dt2412

 

Apparently it has a 450w power supply according to some random dude on the internet. That should be fine, according to the enermax calculator the minimum that you could get away with is 370ish watts. People already over estimate what they need, then they over estimate on top of that "just to be safe". Having said that i would still suggest upgrading the power supply. Just because the one that will be in there will be pretty crappy and may not like delivering all that power even though it is rated to handle it (provided the guy on some website was correct about 450w). A 500w power supply will be sufficient for you needs and also give you the ability to add an ssd and some hdd's as well as another pcie card if you wanted to. If you were ever planning on sticking a second 970 in there you would want to look higher. Just make sure that you buy something decent with at least 80+ bronze so that you know it can actually hit the wattage it claims without burning your house down

As i have said, My PSU is 600w (80+ gold, actually capable of 720w despite advertised as 600w) and it is running an overclocked I5 2500k, GTX 970, GTX560ti (both GPU's overclocked), soundcard along with many other pci and pcie cards as well as all the other stuff. It copes just fine under GPU rendering load while using the CPU for other tasks. All voltages remain as they should be within very small margins. While 450w *should* be enough i dont really trust PSU's when i dont know that they are capeable of whats advertised, who actually makes it or even if it is 450w in the first place.

 

Unless you want it to blow up, get a decent PSU. I wouldn't risk a 3770K and a 970 on a shitty PSU.

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120% efficiency? You've just discovered a source of infinite electricity!

 

That is not how PSU efficiency works.

If a PSU claims it can deliver 800 watts while being 80+ efficient that means it will draw 1000w from the wall. That is very overly simplified though, The power supply may not be 80% efficient at 100% load. Usually its only 80+ eff between certain ranges.

If you look here you can see that my model of PSU should always remain above 90% efficency under that 600w limit, if you push it above there i have no doubt the efficiency would drop off: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/cooler_master_silent_pro_gold_600w_psu_review,3.html

You will also see on a later page that it took them using 2 gtx 295's (one of the most power hungry card at time of test). That is a quad sli system with an overclocked albeit from a bygone era.

 

If that was the case then why would it be called a 700W PSU if it only ever outputted 520W? Aljowen is right, PSU efficiency works where 100% efficient is pulling 100W from the wall and turning it into 100W DC. 80% efficiency is when 100W is required and it pulls 125W from the wall, but the relation between power output and efficiency is not linear, it depends, just like the torque curve of an engine.

 

I traded a Geforce 8800GTS 320MB for a 4GB DDR3 stick of ram that I have no use for. Worth it?

 

More RAM = More sweg

 

You'll find that the rated wattage is at wall not at output