Upgrade from 1070 to 3070 TI - do I need a new power supply

Hi All,

I got a new card - i think I'm currently running a 650 watt psu (a corsair one about 5 years old)

The box reccomends a 750watt but I'd like to know do I really need one of these fancy pants gols/platinum psu;s ?

 

If you undervolt the card you should be able to run it fine.

 

Doubt you'll have an issue at all. If it's a 5 year old power supply, then 650w should mean 650w on the 12V rail.

Assuming you have a standard high-end CPU from 5 years ago, say a 7700K or something, I'd doubt you'd ever draw combined power of even 500w on the 12V rail from CPU + GPU concurrently.

 

The 3070Ti I had drew almost 300w by itself so a 650w PSU is borderline IMO. It did drop to 220w with a .950v undervolt though.

 

i had a 3070 Ti on a 650w gold psu few weeks ago and was also drawing ~280w at full load.
total power draw on 2700x system ROG mobo + 1tb nVME + 2x hdd 7200rpms + DVDRW + usb hubs etc came in @ about 590w

it will work, but no headroom. 750 to be safe

 

if your PSU is 5years old already, getting a new one is very cheap insurance for brand new 3070ti, you will typically get 5-7years out of them before they stop working, and as they age, they lose the ability to output the max watts over time.

In saying that, you could push it and wait another 2yrs or until it stops working completely, id be checking out its reported TGP/TBP (total board power = gpu+vram) values reported in gpuz or afterburner or even hwinfo, to get an idea how much its consuming plus the system as a whole.

if under 500w, i wouldnt worry about it, if its closer to 550-580w (total system power), id be buying a new PSU asap, and limiting/reducing the power limit in afterburner as a just in case, but thats just me, id rather spend 200-300 on a psu now, then wait 6weeks+ for RMA

 

Well I bought an 850 watt MSI Gold 80…


And I can tell you the quality of the cabled is absolute fucking garbage. My old Corsair had really nice braided cables…. This MSI shit shut the most shittiest shit I’ve ever wanted to shit on.

#msi-psu-is-shit

 

ouch, yeah it really important to check reviews on psu's, they are the one component you do not skimp on, you can pretty much safely buy any brand of any other component without checking reviews (YMMV), but from my experience, its worth spending a whole day checking the psu reviews for any that make your shortlist, or whats available at your favorite retailer.

its usually best to stick to seasonic psu's, there is a reason why corsair and all the others sell rebranded seasonic units in all the premium lines, and if its a popular model, can always buy a set of compatible 3rd party cables like cablemod to get a better aesthetic if it bothers you.

 

You probably already realised this, but you should have gone with another high end Corsair. Their cables are mint, and I've never had a single issue with any Corsair PSU I've owned. They are are also whisper quite...

 

Hands up those here who have ever overloaded a reputable branded power supply (i.e. Corsair) and it actually blew up their mobo, CPU, or GPU.

I don't think it's fair to call out anyone here to say they're "wrong", but a) Your 5 year old Corsair 600w would likely have been fine in the first place, and b) Even if it wasn't, it would have not hurt to give it a go first.

There's a whole multitude of protections built into even old Corsair PSUs, whether it's over current, under/over voltage protection plus a range of other safeties.

I just did a test with my 400w TDP 3080 (3x8pin) and rocket lake 11900K @ 5.2ghz all-core, 1.4x volts, uncorked power limits. The highest I saw was 700w drawn from the wall (using my wall outlet meter) in Cyberpunk in the most combined CPU + GPU intensive areas.

System is loaded with 3 x SSDs, 32GB RAM, 360mm AIO which has a screen, the 3080 is an Aorus Xtreme which has a screen, + 4 more case fans. 700w from the wall means at most say 620w total system power draw (power supplies are rated on power output to the system, not the input power from the wall). Which then again means less again on the 12V rail, likely around 580w if we factor around 95% of power draw is from 12V rail on modern systems.

Now, in your case, a 5 year old 14nm CPU, let's say for example a 4-core Skylake which would be drawing much less than my maxed out 8-core 11900K, likely 80w less on average, minus another 100w of a 3070Ti vs a 3x8pin 3080, again, like I said, extremely unlikely you'd draw more than 500w on the +12V rail.

Quick search for mid-range older Corsair 600w PSUs, they're rated for 49A on +12V rail, so that's 588w rated. There's always an engineering safety factor built into this to cater for short term loads or spikes well above this.

You've got the MSI Gold 850w now, your choice to use it or return it if the cables suck. If you do return it, I'd still recommend you give your Corsair 600w a go. Even in the unlikely event it can't power your new 3070Ti, it's even more extremely unlikely that its failure mode is to take out a component in your PC.

 

puts hand up! well not overloaded really, was trying to pull just under 600w from a 2year old "860w" PSU

corsair ax860w killed 4x asus rampage 4 x79 sandybridge board (had 3820), 3x radeon 7950s and 1 radeon 7970, all in the space of 1week, i wasnt waiting for RMA, so kept buying another to replace the dead gear.

MSY couldnt believe it, and demanded i bring in the rest of my pc so they could test it, 1st thing they did was pull the psu and hook it up to their test bench, instant killed it, they made another, made into windows, loaded up furmark, killled the system in about 15sec.

So they sent the psu back to corsair with a bill for all the damage, as it still worked, they didnt pay it of course, but they did send back brand new replacement ax1200, which i gave away to two customers instore.

 

Lol forgive me but... This damage didn't happen in 1 go? During the course of the week, you continued swapping parts out for them to continue failing one by one til you went through 4x motherboards and 4x graphics cards?! Sorry I'm sure you can see the funny side now years later but that's wild!

I mean after the 2nd set of failed mobo and GPU surely you'd have had to take a step back and go ... Wait... Hang on... What's common to this build that can kill these components?

 

Its seems obvious now in hindsight, back then not so much.

the Corsair AX series where legendary at the time, back then, it was *the best money could buy* and one of those purchases that you would never regret doing, this kind of failure wasnt well known, it was extremely rare for a PSU to fail in this way, after it, it still worked. It had all the protections that modern PSU's have today (over/under current/ripple/surge etc etc).

Even the MSY staff refused to believe that a corsair psu that was still working, killed all these gpus & motherboards. It took 2 of their own test rigs to believe that the PSU *might* be the issue and to send it off on RMA, cause its still functioning....

As part of diagnosing the issue on my end, i swapped gpus and psu's out with a mates SLI rig, to test each component and make sure when i took it back to shop for RMA, when they tested it, it was as exactly as i told them, so they couldnt refuse RMA.

What surprised me the most at the time, when it was in a mates pc, with SLI 580's, his rig techinically drawed more power then mine, and ran fine for a day with no issues what so ever, hence i went through so many boards+gpus before i bought a new PSU (which was an antec 800w, which reviewed very poorly vs the corsair).

I can laugh at it now, but its one of things, that you dont want to see someone else going through, hence the reason why i said dont skimp on PSU's, and to consider replacing them when the hit 5yrs-7yr mark, replacing a board+cpu+gpu is ALOT more then a good quality PSU.

 

Maybe, but where do you draw the line? In your example above it was a 2 year old high end PSU.

I mean, this mass murderer AX860 had developed something that none of the safeties could detect and protect downstream components from, which is strange given we are talking about DC loads here. And it seems like it didn't matter what amount of load you connected to it, it was killing it in 15 seconds.

From the sounds of things, nobody actually used a PSU tester or even at least a multimeter to test each rail, but just kept swapping new parts in and out and being miffed about it. I can understand though you don't have to be an electrical engineer to be a PC expert.

I suppose there are mysteries like this that happen with any kind of product. But replacing a 5 year old PSU just because you've upgraded from a 1070 to a 3070ti, doesn't strike me as the first thing to do if I already had a decent PSU that had been working fine.

 

simply put; buying a new psu is just very cheap insurance. Is it necessary? no, but it wont hurt either way.

where each person draws the line will be upto them, for me its a combination of going off what information ive researched and what ive experienced. Replacing PSU's somewhere between the 5yr-7yr is the smart move in my book.

if its the HX series, it think they use to have a 7-8yr warranty and the ax had 10yrs, its been a very long time since i last looked or considered a corsair PSU once i found out they where pretty much all rebranded seasonic's.

upgrading to a new PSU gets you the lastest in PSU advancements (mostly more power efficiency) and nvidia's or pcie-sig's new power connector for video cards, but this generation they are bundling adapters for older PSUs that lack those connectors, so not a deal breaker for a current gen card, might be an issue for the next gen if they stop bundling the adapters though?

 

rm, rmx hx all have 10 yr. plenty of 'good' psu designs. but you never know when you'll get a faulty one. so i go for the warranty every time. which is insurance too.
still using a hx bought in 2008 but it was dormant for a few years. warranty is long gone. it is rare for a psu to take out other components. but it can happen.

 

This. PSUs are the only component that I have gotten DOAs and warranty claims on.

Also HDD back in the day but those times are gone now with SSDs.