GTX 560 Ti and power supplies

[sweatlaserxp]

Hey everyone,

I want to get a GTX 560 Ti, but I'm kinda nervous about my ol' PSU. The 560 Ti has a TDP of 170W. I have an Antec Earthwatts 430 (EA-430). It's almost 5 years old. The sticker says it has two +12V rails at 17A each. The sticker also says the maximum load on the two 12V rails is 360W. My system is an old Athlon X2 4600+ 65W, one HDD, one DVD drive, and ATi 3870 (TDP @100W). I've hooked my computer up to a Kill-A-Watt meter while running benchmarks and it never seemed to draw more than 150W or so (from what I remember).

I could purchase a new PSU at the same time as the card, but I was hoping to hold off until later this summer when I build my new system. Any of you guys have any experience with the 560 Ti running on older PSUs? I know that nV and AMD tend to exaggerate the PSU specs because they're afraid of people who are using generic crap.

 

[Guest]

look at the BLUE bar

@ 159 watts means you need 2 six pin power connections and i think your PSU has but 1.

 

[delluser1]

Hey everyone,

I want to get a GTX 560 Ti, but I'm kinda nervous about my ol' PSU. The 560 Ti has a TDP of 170W. I have an Antec Earthwatts 430 (EA-430). It's almost 5 years old. The sticker says it has two +12V rails at 17A each. The sticker also says the maximum load on the two 12V rails is 360W. My system is an old Athlon X2 4600+ 65W, one HDD, one DVD drive, and ATi 3870 (TDP @100W). I've hooked my computer up to a Kill-A-Watt meter while running benchmarks and it never seemed to draw more than 150W or so (from what I remember).

I could purchase a new PSU at the same time as the card, but I was hoping to hold off until later this summer when I build my new system. Any of you guys have any experience with the 560 Ti running on older PSUs? I know that nV and AMD tend to exaggerate the PSU specs because they're afraid of people who are using generic crap.

That's there to fool you, there's no OCP , it's a single rail
I'd be a little concerned about it's age, but you apparently haven't put much of a load on it so it shouldn't be a problem to use it till you upgrade "later this summer"

 

[sweatlaserxp]

look at the BLUE bar
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_560_Ti_448_Cores/images/power_peak.gif
@ 159 watts means you need 2 six pin power connections and i think your PSU has but 1.

Yeah, but it comes with that beautiful shiny molex-to-6 pin adapter

 

[dish_moose]

I say think about what you will do in the future - sli?? If possible put some $$ away a make the psu a priority. Get this before your new system - will not go to waste.
-Bruce

 

[sweatlaserxp]

That's there to fool you, there's no OCP , it's a single rail
I'd be a little concerned about it's age, but you apparently haven't put much of a load on it so it shouldn't be a problem to use it till you upgrade "later this summer"

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'm going to go ahead and see if it functions ok on the Antec. I doubt there will be any problems. If it gets weird on me, then I'll yank it and order a new PSU.

 

[Guest]

Yeah, but it comes with that beautiful shiny molex-to-6 pin adapter

AHHHH!
yep thats right.

 

[sweatlaserxp]

Well I got the card hooked up this afternoon and I'm kind of disappointed with the results. I uninstalled the Catalyst software for my old 3870, rebooted in safe mode, ran Driver Sweeper, etc. Installed the card, booted up, installed 301.42 drivers.

The first thing I ran was the old Unigine Tropics benchmark, framerates were wayyyy higher than the 3870. However, I ran the Far Cry 2 benchmarks "Ranch" and "Action" at max settings and 1080 res. (4xAA), and average FPS were 24 and 15, respectively. I looked up some 560 Ti benchmarks for Far Cry 2 and I came up with this Techspot review where they averaged 74 FPS.

http://www.techspot.com/review/359-nvidia-geforce-gtx-560ti/page6.html

However, their test setup was running on an i7 920, and I'm running ancient technology (see below).

http://www.techspot.com/review/359-nvidia-geforce-gtx-560ti/page3.html

I fired up the single player campaign on Far Cry 2 and I noticed the framerates were much higher when I was out in the woods, but when I went into town the framerates plummeted (where there's a lot of AI). I tried Splinter Cell Conviction max settings with 4xAA, and it's inconsistent. Sometimes it's fluid, but I noticed that when there are a lot of lights in viewpoint, the framerates viewpoint.

I'm wondering if my computer is so old that I'm running up against CPU-limits. My system is ancient- AMD Athlon X2 4600+, 4Gb RAM, ancient 320Gb Seagate HD, really old Biostar NF-520 AM2+ mobo, running Windows 7 64-bit. My 4600+ doesn't even qualify as the minimum spec for some newer titles. Even something like the i3-2100 is a whole order of magnitude more powerful than what I'm currently running.

I'm not that disappointed because I'm building a new computer some time later this summer, but I think what is going on is my CPU is strangling my GPU. Far Cry 2 is yesterday's news, it came out several years ago, and any recent mid-range card should run it pretty nice, but then again, most people are running more recent hardware. What do you guys think about this?