Posted May 19, 2011
crackedegg: Not mentioned: an affordable PSU for such a system, if not overclocking at all, or not much, would be pretty much any of Corsair, Antec, or Seasonic's 400W to 500W units. Go with 500W, or a bit more, if overclocking. Don't get too cheap of a PSU. As affordable as Corsair and Antec units are, these days, there is no excuse for getting a crap PSU for a nice system.
Very good advice. An inadequate PSU will make everything else run badly. I wouldn't consider less than 500W for a new gaming rig, though. The reason is that modern motherboards and graphics cards need high current at +12V, and there just aren't any less-than-500W units that can supply the 34 amps (more if you're going to overclock, and a lot more if you intend to run SLI or Crossfire) or so that you need.
Except for power supplies with a single 12V rail (chiefly Corsair), look closely at the combined 12V power. Multi-rail supplies won't deliver full power on all the rails at once; they'll deliver some lesser combined power. You may see something like "+12V1 22A, +12V2 18A, combined +12V power not to exceed 408W". Gobbledygook like this means "you can draw 22A from the first rail, or 18A from the second rail, but not both at the same time. You can draw only 408W [which is 34A] total from the two rails at the same time."
The two leading suppliers, Antec and Corsair, have a confusing alphabet soup of model numbers. I'll try to decipher some of them.
Corsair uses two-letter codes, like TX or GS.
HX and TX models are their top of the line. HX models have modular cabling; TX models don't. GS is a new model. It's the same as TX. All of these are excellent.
VX and CX are Corsair's low-end models. Avoid them. VX are the same as the old Antec Earthwatts. CX are even cheaper units that aren't even properly spec'd at operating temperature.
Antec uses even more confusing names, including very different power supplies sold in the same model line. Signature, Truepower, and Neo are their best lines. You'll see funny variations on that like Truepower Quattro, Neo Eco, etc. They're mostly Seasonic-made and the same as Seasonic's better models. They tend to be better-priced than comparable Corsair-branded or Seasonic-branded power supplies.
Earthwatts is Antec's mid-range line. There are two very different Earthwatts lines. Models ending in "D" are made by Delta. These are good value, better than Corsair's VX or CX lines. Confusingly, the Earthwatts 650 is also a Delta-made model. Other Earthwatts, without the "D", are older, cheaper Seasonic units.
Basiq is Antec's low-end line. These are cheaply made power supplies from a hodgepodge of manufacturers, some of which are not very good. As with the low-end Corsairs, avoid them.