I'd look at getting better than a c tier low end PSU.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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What issues can come from buying a cheaper PSU?
It's just gotta supply power and that's it, innit? The PSU seems like a great place to shave some bucks off the total cost
All it has to do is supply power. But when it goes bad it can go BAD.
Best case scenario it just stops working. Worst case is an actual fire. If you’re pushing the limits of the PSU (transient spike count too) can cause it to fail In smaller ways (low voltage that cause odd hard to trace behavior) or for the power supply to shut off for “no reason”.
I think gamers nexus did the video on the gigabyte PSU that would explode every time they pushed its limits in a specific way.
That makes sense! I usually give myself some power "headroom" when picking a PSU in case I upgrade to more demanding parts in the future, but I also never alter the voltage limits on a build. I know that's more important with overclocking and such, so that might be a very useful concern for users who are planning on doing that.
The more expensive PSU are rated on terms of efficiency. Meaning more electricity goes to your components and less to heat. A cheaper PSU means higher heats (therefore less performance of CPU/gpu), higher fan noise, and higher operating costs.
Are those operating costs substantial over the lifetime of the product? Or are the effects of the heat efficiency?
While more efficient products are technically better, I'm skeptical the differences are significant enough to splurge on a better PSU. At least if budget it a concern, it seems like a safe place to trim a little fat.
Depends on how long you are going to keep that PSU and how much power you're working with, and the climate you're in.
More to my point: It gets fucking hot in my room in summer with the comp running, even in a mild climate, and I don't want the computer shooting out 5% more heat and making it more uncomfortable
Depends on your price per kilowatt hour.
A PC pulling 300w with a 600w bronze PSU (~85% efficient) will be pulling ~350w from the wall. With a gold PSU (~90% efficient) will be pulling ~330w from the wall.
So, for every hour of playing, you're saving 20 watt hours. Thats 50 hours of playing to save a single kWh. Assuming a 25 hr gaming week for a moderate player (full time job, gaming after work and on weekends), that would save you 26 kWh a year.
Depending on your energy costs, and how you expect them to change in the future (almost always going to go up), you can probably expect the PSU upgrade to pay for itself in ~3-5 years if you have a moderately high cost per kWh (like 30 cents or more?).
High efficiency PSUs are gonna pay for themselves faster the more you use them. If it's a one time thing for someone that's only going to play 2 hrs a day, bronze is probably the better option (but you still want a quality bronze one from a known good manufacturer). If you're gonna move your PSU in between builds it's more of a decade long purchase and will continue to save you in the long run. It all just depends on the situation.
If you're just building this for a colleague that doesn't play much, give them a quality bronze PSU and (and maybe upgrade it if you can find a quality gold for another $10-15).
A bad power supply can get every other component in the system. You don't have to go top end, but a reputable mid tier is highly recommended.
I've always wondered this... I run a cheap PSU that came with my rig and I've never had issues with it
My logic would be it's a component you shouldn't need to upgrade. Whereas the motherboard and everything attached + hard drive can all be updated as better components are made.
So since it's one of the few "lifetime" components, might as well get a nice one that lasts.
The theory is cheap PSUs don't always have the same guardrails against surging during a failure, or external power event. You don't want your power supply to take your motherboard/CPU/GPU with it when it dies.
i oversized it slightly for this build. and another chinesium power supply i own has been running flawlessly for 10 years. the power surge protection thing doesn't really concern me. the network in my country is extremely stable.
I'd buy a cheaper case and get a 5600 instead. I wouldn't go lower than that in this day and age, except for an absolute budget build. And I'd consider Radeon 6700XT which scores better than the 3060 in a lot of benchmarks and can often be had for less.
my brother runs a 3600 in his PC with a similar card, and he gets phenomenal performance for what he spent on it. plus i explained in another thread that the price increase from the newer one isn't really worth it to us and that we can always upgrade, since it's AM4.
from my research, the 6700xt a 50€ price increase for minimal performance increase in some specific cases. since she's likely going to play raytracing enabled games in the future, i'm just gonna stick with the 3060ti.
At this point in time it doesn't make any sense to upgrade inside of AM4. Either get the better CPU now, or jump to AM5 or something newer.
Unless you can find a used 5800x3d for sub $100 in a year or so I wouldn't bother. You're going to end up spending more money to baby step than if you'd just bought something better from the get go.
i will keep that in mind. although i imagine am5 equipment requiring ddr5 and overall being more expensive.
DDR5 prices have tanked recently. AM5 prices will hopefully drop soon, but I think the days of a really good $100 motherboard are over.
If you can afford it, the 5800x3d is a huge upgrade over both the 3600 and the 3900x. I had also thought that the lack of load during gaming meant I didn't need to upgrade my 3900x, but it turns out you get a lot of lag in unoptimized games when the CPU runs out of L3 cache and has to talk to the RAM. And this is more common than a lot of us realized. I noticed 25 fps increases in Hell Let Loose just with that upgrade, for example.
yeah, we looked at getting a 5600 for this build, but it's like 50 bucks more for like 5-10 FPS. plus my brother runs a 3600 in his rig and says there's no problems. getting last gen hardware is always a bit sketchy, but she's always able to just buy any AM4 socket cpu a few years into the future. thanks for the recommendation though.
Try to find a used 3600 or 5600. Tons of people have upgraded their CPUs once the 5800x3d came out. I've got my old 5600x just sitting unused in a box because I haven't bothered with coming up with a project for it yet.
depending on who is buying it for holidays, it might be too late already. but that's a great idea, i bought all of my graphics cards used, why not the CPU?
Double check that the case has enough room for the AIO cooler in the position you want to place it. You can usually find out by checking the manual, companies like Corsair and Fractal Design make a point of mentioning the distances between, say, the top fan mounts and the RAM slots on the motherboard. I ran into an issue with my current build where the RAM I bought is slightly too high and I can't fit the radiator where I wanted it with the fans attached.
That said, I put the AIO cooler in the front instead of the top and it runs just fine, even if it's not as thermally efficient. But it would have saved me some time and frustration during the build to have planned better.
this is going to be a regular air cooled system unless i spelled the name of the cooler wrong. thanks for the concern though. vengeance lpx is a very low profile kind of RAM. i never had any issues with an even bigger Beqiet cooler. gonna check the clearance between glass and cooler though.
Duhhh whoops, I shoulda read a little slower.
I have one of BeQuiet!'s AIO coolers, hence my warning. Far less likely of an issue with an air cooled system, though I did once run into an issue with a massive cooler knocking against the optical drive cage in an older build (back when optical drives were necessary and GPUs connected via the AGP slot).
For the M2 drive, PCIE 4.0 is wasted money over 3.0. I've actually "downgraded". In my system over my last re-install, intending on moving all my games over to the pcie4 drive after getting the old system wiped off it. For the time being I'm running everything on the pcie3. Well, now I'm just committed to it. That was 6 months ago. I honestly can't tell the difference between a game on the pcie3 and pcie4 drive.
The Crucial P3 2tb is less than 100 USD, ~85 GBP, and looks like it's about 108 EUR on Amazon FR and DE. It's a fantastic drive.
For the CPU cooler... why not just go with the stock AMD fan?
Also, I see in another comment you've said you went with Nvidia for raytracing. No one is going to be doing raytracing on 1440p 144hz with a 3060ti at over 60fps. For the budget you have here, forget about Ray tracing, and just pick a GPU that has the best raw rasterization performance. That maybe AMD or Nvidia depending on your local market prices, but if you can squeeze a rx6800 into the budget that would be a massive boost in performance.