Corsair HX850W enough to run liquid cooled Crossfire R9 290s and i7-3770K?

swiftor

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Hi folks, quick questions!

1. Will a Corsair HX850 (850W) be enough to safely run 2 liquid cooled GPUs and a CPU?
PSU calculators out there are giving conflicting results so I turned to experts. You!!

2. Will I be able to overclock the GPUs?
3. If 850W is not enough, what should I do? I already have all the parts.

Setup:

GPUs: 2x Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X
GPU Coolers: 2x Corsair HG10 + 2x Corsair H75 (in push pull)
CPU: Intel i7-3770K
CPU Cooler: Corsair H80i
PSU: Corsair HX850 (850W) (Gold certified)

Mobo: MSI Z77MA-G45
Storage: 1x 128GB Crucial M4, 1x 500GB WD Green, 1x Seagate 500GB 7200rpm

I originally planed to have everything air cooled which would have been fine on a 850W PSU but with the addition of 3 liquid cooling pumps, I am worried.

Thank you all in advance for your help.

Peace,
Swiftor

Edit: fixed title
 

swiftor

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Thanks for your replies.
What I meant is please enlighten me as to how/why this PSU isn't enough for the setup.
I'd love to understand what I'm missing.

For example, two reviews say the HX850 can handle 1000W and remain above 80% efficiency.
Hardware Secrets
Overclock3d

Also, even with a slight overclock on the cards one person reports a power draw under 800W for the entire system.
And that's with a CPU that draws more power than the 3770K
Link
 

swiftor

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The charts recommend 1000W but the PSU calculator tool on the same page gives an estimated wattage of 768W.
Link
This is confusing.

Edit: added PSU calculator data.
 

melonhead

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i would not go off of what people have reported. i would base it off of factual numbers. the wattage for this power supply is 850 watts. based on what the cards need, you need something that produces 1000w....as sr71 mentioned
 


The problem with the eXtreme Outer Vision PSU Calculator is that it uses the power consumption of reference design graphics cards.

The Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X cards use considerably more power than the AMD Reference Design Radeon R9 290 card.
 


Hi - As blackbird & ko888 have already mentioned, these tri-x cards are capable of pulling a lot
more power from the PSU than referenced (or most other non-reference) cards.
Please see this from an actual test by Tweaktown:

"When at stock clocks, using around 600W draw from the entire machine (sans monitor) is to be expected, considering they're Radeon R9 290Xs in CrossFire. Running them in CrossFire at 2560x1440 is no basic resolution, unlike 720p and 1080p.

But the power consumption numbers begin to climb with our overclock, from around 600W to 860W. This is a large increase, very close to 50%. This isn't surprising, considering the amazing bandwidth increase we receive - and we are running two of them in CrossFire.

Something I didn't expect, was using the "200% scaling" in Battlefield 4, which is just a fancy word for Super Sampling. Using this 200% option renders the image at 200% of the original, rendered resolution, and considering we're running 2560x1440 - this is a huge task for the GPU.

It is rendering an image much larger than 4K, and sampling it down to fit onto our 2560x1440 display. This gives the GPUs a much tougher workload, something I didn't see coming - not this much, anyway.

We went from 860W on our overclocked Tri-X GPUs to a massive, unexpected 1050W. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the power meter ticking at 1050W, as this is something I would've expected from a 3-way CrossFire setup."

http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/37/sapphire-radeon-r9-290x-tri-x-overclocked-power-consumption-numbers/index.html

 

melonhead

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with wat toy just put, what was probably read is that the card can be run off of the 850w supply, but that is under minimal load. the specs for a card is going to tell you what you would need to run the card reliably. if you went with a 850w PSU, and the card was maxed out during gameplay, as example, its going to try drawing more than it can, because the card can ultimately pull 1000w of power, which the 850 simply cannot provide.