How to find an upgrade PSU for Dell XPS 8500

It's a GTX 1060. Is 600W really enough, and not dangerously borderline? If so, thanks, would love to be wrong about thinking I need more.

A little context: I ordered the 1060 based on going to NVidia's website where they list their products, and picking the nicest card that (I thought) would work with my dinky 460W power supply. The 1060 seemed to fit the bill. Their website says "recommended system power, 400W", and I have 460W. Well, last time I checked, 460 > 400, so since I have more power than they recommend, I figured I'd be fine.

Then the card arrived, I put it in the machine, hooked up the auxiliary power, and... it wouldn't even boot up. Just sat there on the BIOS screen beeping at me. Looked in the troubleshooting guide, and it said "this means you don't have enough power", which rather took me aback, given that I have more than recommended power. I mean, this wasn't even under maximum load running some high-end game or anything-- it wouldn't even boot up,

So, naturally I started googling, and found this person with a similar problem. It's not exactly the same card-- this is a few years ago, he had a GTX 650ti-- but that's a card that also supposedly needs 400W system power, and has a pretty close listed power requirement to the 1060 (110W, as opposed to the 1060's 120W).

And the person who responded to him said,

Dell only lists it as a 450w which is cutting it REALLY close with an aftermarket 650ti... We usually recommend a "name branded" 550w (at least) power supply

Click to expand...

...So, my takeaway from that is, "NVidia's tech specs are optimistically fibbing, and whatever system power it says I need, I actually need nearly 50% more than that." Is that wrong?

So I figured, okay, I've got this 1060 sitting here, it says I need 400W, so I should have 600W minimum... but that's just for this card, maybe I'll be upgrading to a better card sometime in a year or two, and I really don't want to have a borderline power supply card. In general, I'm allergic to mucking with hardware; swapping out a video card or a hard drive is about the limit of my usual comfort zone. I'm not a "builder" and have never swapped a power supply before, and would prefer not to have to do so again if I don't have to. Money's not much of a concern, and I would really rather have a supply that's "overkill" and has a comfortable safety margin, which I don't have to futz with, than one that's borderline-barely-enough and maybe has technical problems popping up, and have to swap out the power supply again if I ever get a card that needs slightly more juice.

Balanced against all that is the fact that I'm a total ignoramus about power supplies, have never swapped one (my algorithm has always been "when the power supply dies, it's time to get a new computer"), and I'm fully prepared to believe that I've gotten a completely wrong-headed picture of How Things Work.

So, maybe I could better state my problem like this:

I have a Dell XPS 8500 with all original OEM hardware, other than video card (currently running a GTX 750) and an extra hard drive I added. I have purchased a GTX 1060 6GB and would like to use it in my computer My current 460W power supply (which came with the computer) won't even boot up, if this card is installed.

Given all that, I want a power supply that will meet the following criteria:

• 
  ■ Will physically fit in my XPS 8500
  ■ Has easily enough power to run a GTX 1060, with plenty of safety margin to guarantee (inasmuch as that's possible) that I won't have problems with it, and have a bit of "head room" for the next time I upgrade a video card
  ■ Is as high a quality as possible. I don't care about price, but I loathe having to debug hardware problems and would rather shell out cash to get something rock-solid reliable.

What's my best course?

Yup. The old OEM supply did have a 6-pin connector, and I did hook it up to the 1060. However, beep, beep, beep. I looked on the PSU, and apparently it has three +12V rails, which are limited to 18A, 16A, and 8A. I have no idea which one the 6-pin connector is hooked up to, but supposing it's the 8A, that would imply 8A * 12V = 96W, which is below the listed requirement for the card, so perhaps that could be it, was my thinking.

Anyway, I finally managed to track down a 750W power supply that fits; got a Cooler Master V750.

Unfortunately... that didn't solve the problem. Even with the new 750W power supply-- which is obviously plenty of power for the 1060-- it still won't boot up. Same as before: stuck on the BIOS screen, beeping at me once every fifteen seconds or so (I didn't bother to time it exactly).

If I take out the 1060 and put the old card back in (a 750Ti, which incidentally doesn't require an auxiliary power connection), then the computer starts up just fine, so at least I know I've gotten all the various PSU cables hooked up.

The fact that I just get a beep, beep, beep even with the 750W power supply in there makes me think this is some issue with the video card, rather than with the power supply. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that might be. The troubleshooting guide calls out this behavior as a symptom of "insufficient power", and provides no alternative hypothesis.

But since I have in fact found a decent power supply now, and it works, perhaps I should close this question as "answered" and open a different one about the 1060?

Thank you! That turned out to be the problem-- updated to the latest BIOS, and it fired right up.