Graphics card and power

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andyy01

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Hi everybody, I'd like to ask you if a Spire 400w power supply (15A on 12V) might be enough to run a Sapphire r7 260x gpu? as I found this card at a very good price, but I'm not quite sure the power will be quite enough....I know it might be risky, but could it work? Anyone tried something similar out?
My original plans were to get a Gainward gtx 750, but I've reached this point where I found the Amd card at a way better price and from what I've read it's actually better. The price I found is really good tho I can't really afford also a new power supply, but the graphics card needs urgent replacement.
If it is of any importance, the system also runs a cpu at 65W tdp and a hard drive.
Thank you very much! :bounce:
 
15A on the 12V rail isn't going to run much, thats only 180W on the 12V rail. Your CPU will need 65W of that leaving 115W, and an R7 260 needs 115W mostly from the 12V rail, your motherboard also needs ~30W, and your hard drive will need 10W just to start up, its not going to run. With a PSU that old it likely can't do its nameplate capacity anymore so its going to burn...

Really your only priority here should be replacing your power supply, 15A on the 12V rail makes it a 250W supply not a 400W supply, 80% of the power a modern computer uses is from the 12V rail. If yours still has a -5V rail its at least 7 years old, if it has a lot more current on its 5V rail than its 12V rail then it was meant for pre-Pentium 4 era.
 
A 500w psu is required for that card.

Also your PSU brand is not a good one. Spire has in the past been busted for decietful labeling.

The last part to go cheap on is the part that can DESTROY everything else.
Get an 80+ rated (note: 80+ not 80 PLUS) power supply from Antec, EVGA, XFX, Seasonic or Corssair (not the cx/cxm serries as their capacitors fail after about a year).
 
Where are you getting the capacitors in the CX/CXM failing within a year from? They are Capxon caps so they aren't great, but they should last the 3+ year expected lifespan of the PSU without issue, they just might not make it 10 years like we expect 105C rated Nippon Chemicon caps would. There is a lot of FUD floating around about Corsair CX/CXM PSUs, most of it is just FUD and not fact.
 

andyy01

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Pretty sad tho, I have a friend who recently bought that graphics card and has been runing it fine for about 2 weeks on a 450 W delux power supply, another bad brand from what i've heard and I thought maybe I had some sort of chance as well. :( Could he be running on thin ice?
Okay, I got it, but could it actually manage a gtx 750? Or even that could be dangerous?
The PSU isn't old, it's only about a year old, but right now I'm runing on the integrated graphics and I can't really do much with it, except for Mario and Pinball so I pretty much need to change it ASAP and I can't do both.
 
The 750 only needs 300watts.

You might be ok, you might have instability issues when pushing the card, you might damage something. We dont like cheap power supplies because they are an unknown variable (and can damage other parts we paid good money for).

In regards to hunters comment about them failing in three years. There is information all over the internet about the cx series capacitors failing with short life, I have known two people who had them fail in the first year - two years range. Online there is not much information in regards to lifespan, nothing that supports my claim or yours.
 

meat_loaf

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You are spewing random sh*t out without any clue. I use Corsair CX600 for over 5 years in my rig and not once did it fail me when I need the power. Seasonic is one of the best rated PSU because they are the ones that makes a lot of them.
 


Well I am glad that your CX series PSU has been without issues for you.

Check these references and you can find many many more on the internet.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1415677/whats-exactly-the-problem-with-corsairs-cx-psus
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=22294
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1796899/psu-corsair.html

You can also find many threads about it the cx series capacitors on toms hardware as well.


If you are also calling my claim on spire as bs, then I suggest you check this:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Power-Supplies-With-Fake-80-Plus-Badges/1054/3


Any thing else you want to accuse me of being inaccurate on, and your sources to back it up?

EDITED: I knew two people who had their CX series PSUs die between year one and two, that is where I am getting my info on the CX caps going bad in a year. So I will fully admit that that portion of info is strictly from personal observation and not from any industry average or research.
 

meat_loaf

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Your "sources" are not even legitimate sources from real reviewers of hardware. Your sites are all just <mod edit> opinions from people that hear <mod edit> from other people and then post random crap. And that "hardware secrets" is just a lame ass article that don't even have Corsair down as a bad PSU. Fail evidence and a fail argument by a fail person with no knowledge. ---> proves my point when you put "EDIT: I know my friends CX died.....".

None of the tech reviews out there even mention CX as a bad series. The actual reviews like Paul from Newegg, Linus, Hardware Canucks, all put CX as a decent PSU. All that bad sh*t you call CX is by people making personal opinions upon hearing other people making bs claim. My CX is a fact that its a great PSU with no problem even with intense overclocking for both CPU and GPU.

If CX have that much failure rate then mine won't last five years after intense use from overclocking, and yet here it stands still kicking even with crossfire r9 270. That is more than enough proof to overcome the BS sources you are providing.

Clean your eyes and ears and start seeing the actual reviews not rumours and self-procliamed issues and bad brand when obviously those people have clue what they are doing.

And obviously you have no clue what you are talking about when you can't provide a single <mod edit> evidence on hunter315 question and just tell him to go google, that is ROFL. So thats your source by telling people to google. Then I can type in "negative reinforced search words" to find bad <mod edit> about every single branded items with enough forums on people making claims.

<Moderator Warning: Watch your language in the forums>
 
I put edited because I posted and latter added to the post, thus making it known that I changed the post.

The hardware secrets link was a link to show about the spire power supply brand, not the cx series.
If you bothered to read the thread instead of just wanting to insult me you would have seen that.
I bought a kingston v300 ssd for my htpc last holiday right after they started selling their ssds with the asynchronous nram in it, you dont see me calling everyone who says it isan inferior product an idiot and saying their knowledge base is crap.
You dont agree with the cx series being a bad psu for heavy gaming, fine, but i am not going to recommend the psu to someone else when many sources say it is using inferior capacitors. Its not personal, I am just not going to recommend it, why you have to personally attack me is uncalled for and pretty childish. I don't need to prove myself to you, I have a good job in IT and will have an even better one once I get my CCNA so your opinions mean nothing to me.
 

meat_loaf

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Again you use the word "sources" which don't point to anything. You are saying you are not bashing by providing an example of SSD and yet when it comes to CX you are literally saying its bad apple in every single way. You love to contradict yourself and be ignoramous. CX is a decent PSU for a typical build. You find worse <mod edit> in pre-built than what CX gives you. Also most people that complain about failing on PSU's is the fact they don't have a clue what they are putting into their own system and the wattage they need let alone understand how many 12v rail and actual amp it provides to give sufficient power.

I use a Kingstong v300 ssd the same one you use. Everyone flog and say the nram and controller is the reason why SSDs fail and why kingston is bad. Same <mod edit> with Corsair and yet so many people still buy it and use it without problems. You are telling me one story and then providing a contradicting story. Good job there, you just owned yourself on your argument.

 
meat_loaf, go chill out for a few days. You keep demanding he put up sources while insulting him and basing your statements off of anecdotal evidence alone with no sources linked to, yet he has provided sources for his statements. The survivability of your single CX500 tells us absolutely nothing about the survivability of the CX series as a whole, there are good and bad units in every product line, a single sample tells you nothing of the ratio of good to bad.

I'm also not really sure where this came from:
You are spewing random sh*t out without any clue. I use Corsair CX600 for over 5 years in my rig and not once did it fail me when I need the power. Seasonic is one of the best rated PSU because they are the ones that makes a lot of them.
You claim to know so much, yet you don't know that the vast majority of Corsair PSUs, including the ENTIRE CX series are made by Channel Well Tech? Seasonic has only made 16 different models for Corsair, CWT has made 61. When you get a Corsair PSU the odds are on it being CWT, not Seasonic built.

I also enjoy how you bash his anecdotal evidence as not proving anything while then relying on your own, that was worth a giggle. Doctor, heal thyself.

Single samples don't mean a damn thing in the grand scheme of things, with likely close to a million CX units out there a single data point means soooo veryyyy little.


So the next time, before you decide to go off on an angry rant against someone, check yourself before you wreck yourself. And attack statements not the people who made them or you'll find yourself under a banhammer.
 

meat_loaf

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To counter you, I know majority are made by CWT. But here is a fact that no one seems to know. Corsair CX's were intially made by Seasonic first and then later Corsair partnered with CWT which led them to make majority of it because of CWT well regarded reputation. My CX600W as stated on the sticker was made by Seasonic.

Also I don't need to provide sources to counter argue because there are not enough actual review tech sites that specifically state that CX series are extremely bad PSU's. All of the bad rap are coming from random forums that people hear and then reproduce that information. Just like how memes spread, its all crud info.

I can easily find contradicting "forum sources" from users that uses CX without any issues. Here is a sample site

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/94674-corsair-cx-builder-series-whats-wrong-with-them/

Most of the users in there own a CX and barely anyone has any issues whatsoever with it.

Hence the reason I take extreme offense to people when it comes to quality that randomly bash a brand out of pure ignorance. By the way in manufacturing and business, one sample represents a lot of samples. Manufacturers do not test out every single PSU they produce and just hypothetical testing of randomly selecting units to test. The chances of a good and failing unit gets equal distribution. No one knows if a PSU is good or bad unless you use it. I can say the same thing with the production of CPU's. AMD or Intel wouldn't know if each CPU produced performed equally, hence the reason both companies releases bin chips.

 
Sure. I pretty well summed up my feelings in this post a few days ago
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2278418/hate-series.html

What I keep seeing in the reviews are an 85C Panasonic primary and 105C CapXon secondaries, there are a limited number of reviews of the CX series but the 430 reviews and this one for the CX600M all point to consistency through their lineup(@meat_loaf, see that green tape around the transformer? It means its CWT built just like yours is). The primary is only 85C rated so its going to have a faster wear out rate but shouldn't have a high prevalence of random failures.
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/2013/05/corsair-cx600m-power-supply-review/3/

They aren't awful caps, at least they are 105C rated, but it will impact long term reliability. Always remember reliability is actually a bathtub curve, you have those that will die early on(infant mortality), those that will live to obsolescence(wear out), and those that just randomly die. Infant mortality is the only portion that people shout real loudly about for a while, and the cap selection shouldn't impact that too heavily, that is often heavily impacted by FedEx and UPS, but it will have a higher random failure rate which is just annoying. They still have full protection circuitry so most failures should be uneventful, but there will be a higher prevalence of stealthy ones where the filter caps begin to die and ripple ramps up but they seem to have ripple pretty low to start with so a single failure shouldn't be catastrophic. The warranty is generally a good idea of how long they expect it to last, they want to make sure that the majority of units will make it past the warranty timeframe, so they might have calculated an MBTF of ~4.5 years and set the warranty at 3 so they wouldn't have too much fallout, but there will still be some hence the warranty.

When they are priced close to something like an XFX unit I would totally go for the XFX, but a lot of people we get here just want to run an i3, a 750 Ti and need a good cheap 500W PSU so the CX series is decent and better than many things it was trying to compete against(apevia and friends).

In the long run we might find out that CapXon has actually stepped up their game and that these units do fine, but in the meantime we are just filtering through the vocal minority, those who got bad units and are understandably upset, and those who have a good unit and insist that all the units must be good. Only time will tell....
 
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