450W PSU for HD 6950?

[Marreez]

I'm planning on buying a HD 6950 to upgrade from my 5770. But would my Corsair VX450w PSU handle it?

 

[flamehead269]

Perhaps, the Radeon HD 6000 series aren't bad ones,my friend owns one, and he gets to run most games with full graphics including Skyrim, but not the best, send me your specs so I can do the math .

 

[Marreez]

I have a Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.3 Ghz cpu with 4GB Corsair BallistiX Ram @ 1600 Mhz although upgrading to 8GB very soon. Also, do you think my cpu will bottleneck the HD 6950 and would overclocking to 4+ Ghz help?

 

[flamehead269]

Well, if you ask me, I think overclocking by .7 Ghz is kind of a bad idea, even though AMDs CPUs are known to take more temps but O.C risks a lot of things, you need an aftermarket cooler if you plan to overclock and most likely a better power supply, Links to your specs would help me tremedously, I use http://newegg.com/ to review items, also about that bottleneck, yes, every Machine has one to a certain extent, but if you plan to up the RAM to 8GB and upgrade to the top of the Radeon HD 6000 series, then mostly likely. Your CPU and the amount of RAM you have now are most likely going to slow down your GPU a little bit, and less likely the RAM.

 

[flamehead269]

Yes overclocking would help decrease the amount of bottleneck, but you might burn out your CPU if you do it everytime you run your machine, ESPECIALLY if you don't have a decent aftermarket cooler/heatsink installed.

 

[Marreez]

Im not going to overclock on stock cooler of course. If overclocking would help the bottleneck a bit then i'd probably go for something a bit cheaper like Hyper 212 Evo which i see reviews about people reaching 4.5 Ghz on both Intel and AMD with just below 60c.

Would this still be an improvement over my HD 5770?

 

[flamehead269]

Yes most definately! But, if you don't mind I'd likke to see all the links to your specs so I can determine how much power is needed. I am getting that same cooler for my machine as well, also saw those good reviews.

 

[Marreez]

Phenom II X4 945 | HD 5770 | 4GB DDR3 | M4A79XTD EVO | 750GB HDD | Corsair VX450 | Xigmatek Asgard with 4 case fans. I also saw a site where they measured that the 6950 draws about 256W at load with 1,280 x 1,024 resolution, 0xAA 16xAF.

 

[flamehead269]

Yeah, well to answer your question, you need to up that PSU to a 500 watt or a 600/650watt.

 

[songorocosongo]

I'd say get at least a 550w