PSU Watts?

[Jellykiss]

I have a question on the PSU watts. I have an i5-4690k, Asus Z97 A MoBo, Noctua D15 CPU cooler, and my GPU should be coming in today, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming 4GB GDDR5. I think I might of made a mistake with the PSU I bought, its only 550 watts. I'm going to oc the cpu, which i havent yet. So, should I get a 650 watts PSU? Is that enough? I noticed after the fact that the GPU said it needs 550 watt...

[Afrospinach]

550 is plenty for that system, they are very generous with their recommendations.

[Rixis]

They assume you're using a piece of shit PSU for their recommendations, if your is half decent, it's fine.

[Deleted]

Yes with 550W you have room to overclock cpu and gpu further, hmm unless you get gpu to extremes occ

[Jellykiss]

Cool, I was about to waste money and get a higher one. My PSU is a XFX TS 550 bronze. I got worried when I saw that it wanted a 550 PSU. Thanks for the replies! Oh by the way, thank you for the recommendations on my PC build. It's been running great so far even without my gpu.

[Arbiter]

Honestly, wattage is just an advertisement number. When it comes to those systems what matters is the amps on certain voltage rails which obviously IS wattage, but some PSUs have dedicated rails (which are the best) while others have multiple rails which doesn't work well for high end hardware.

You'll notice a chart on your PSU. It'll have different voltages with amps listened under them. +3.3V, +5V, +12V, -12V. Sometimes you'll see multiple +12V rails with lower amperage and this is typically a bad thing and should avoided when possible. +3.3V rail is used for things such as your CPU and certain PCI cards while the 5V rail is typically used for SATA, other PCI slots, and I believe some fans(?). +12V rail is used for PCIe cards (like GPUs) and is typically the thing to watch for because graphics card are the one area where the wattage is highly variable between series and models. You want a dedicated 12V rail with enough amperage to power the card(s) you are using and low quality models can tend to fall short on this. The requirements to power the card itself can be found around the internet in terms of either wattage or amps. If wattage is given just divide that number by 12. IIRC the GTX 970 supposedly can use up to ~28A at max load so you'd need at least that to power it.

Also would need the required connectors to power the card of course.

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Cool, I was about to waste money and get a higher one. My PSU is a XFX TS 550 bronze. I got worried when I saw that it wanted a 550 PSU. Thanks for the replies! Oh by the way, thank you for the recommendations on my PC build. It's been running great so far even without my gpu.

Yea the XFX TS 550 is a Seasonic OEM PSU with a dedicated 12V rail. Pretty solid PSU for the price. It's actually got 45A available on the 12V rail so way more than enough.