Topic: 1Kw PSU apparently not enough juice for 2x7970's Ghz Editions... (Read 28755 times)

Yeah the one time I decide not to go brand name and it bites me hard in the arse!  Never again thats for sure...

I'm quite pleased with the PSU, it definitely is a beast and hasn't skipped a beat. Really stoked things turned out for the better even if it did take almost frying everything in the system for me to understand the importance of a quality PSU!

Just waiting on some risers to arrive now so I can hook up the 2nd 7970... I get some stupid temperature issues when both are plugged in with whichever one is in the top slot rocketing to above 99C. I'm hashing away with just one of them for the moment and on a warm day it doesn't go past 75C. Mostly stays between 59C-65C and getting 734KH/s mining LTC, haven't tweaked around with BTC since before I blew the other PSU... None the less, everything turned out for the better and at least the power issue is now gone for good

Sounds like a bad PSU.  I have a Silverstone Strider Gold 1200 watt powering 4 oc'd 7970s and the mobo,3770k,ram,etc.  

The addition of the 3770k might be pushing it, but I'll be dropping in an intel g1610 shortly and it will be all good.

I've never heard of Powercooler so I don't know.  But the golden number 1 rule in PC building is ONLY buy Name Brand PSUs, no matter what.

Seasonic, Corsair, Antec, Silverstone, PC Power & Cooling, EVGA, XFX, Zalman, etc.  

***edit just saw you bought the Strider Gold 1200w, Great choice man.  The thing is superb quality and a beast.  

It was this one that I bought and it blew on me.. but the nice guys at itestate exchanged it for me tho I opted for an upgrade and went for the Silverstone Strider Gold 1200w. Been running great guns with both my cards and no issues at all. I'm looking at a kill-a-watt solution so I can get a reading from the wall on how much power I'm really drawing and will endeavour do obtain one from JayCar this weekend when I have time. They sell an equivalent for around 20 bucks which is not too heavy on the hip pocket money wise

All in all, I learnt a lesson from trying to be cheap (unintentionally) and as a result almost lost more in hardware which would have really been a hard kick to the balls.

Pedantic.


The new Fujitsu machines I got at work have PSUs that only give out 12v.  The PSU plugs in to the board, and the SATA drives are run off another socket on the board.  The board produces the 3.3v and 5v needed for the SATA drives.

To the comment...

"Buy a brand name"... They are all "brand names", thus, the NAME...

That is the most useless info you can give someone. Especially since "Brand names" are "OEM", and "Generic" PSU's manufactured by someone-else without a name.

"Big brands" make crap too, and have the same hardware malfunctions.

Can't find "power cooler" or "cooler power" PSU's anywhere on the net... So I imagine they were a spin-off trying to "pretend", on error, to be "identified" as a "good brand", (Cooler Master, or PC Power & Cooling) Both are higher quality brands.

I would assume that the 12v rail was just not up to par, at all.

I just had this happen with a "Brand name" lol, Logisys 750w PSU that fried with a 600w load at the wall, on the 12v rails. (Should have been able to handle 700w fine.) POS brand-name crap.

Here is a "big list" of "good BRANDS"... (Note the "models"... Not all models by the same "brand" are equal. EG, Corsair CX = crap/ok, Corsair TX = good/great, Corsair HX = excellent/super) FYI, I normally use the 750 Corsair TX for 3x 7970's + Mobo/CPU. It has run up to 800w at the wall, but normally I run it at 680w-720w at the wall.
http://www.overclock.net/t/183810/faq-recommended-power-supplies

Here is a good source for "crap BRANDS"... (Bottom of page)
http://www.10stripe.com/featured/psu/brand.php

P.S. If it costs $60, it is NOT a 1000Watt anything.
Rule of thumb... For potential expected power/cost
$30 = 300-400w {Cheapest I would ever go, for 1 GPU and CPU/mobo/SSD, or single OC GPU}
$60 = 450-550w
$90 = 600-700w (Cheaper to get two 400w)
$120 = 750-850w (Cheaper to get two 400w)
$160 = 900-1000w (Cheaper to get two 500w) (Even cheaper to get three 400w)
$190 = 1100-1200w (Cheaper to get two 600w) (Even cheaper to get three 400w/500w)
$250 = 1300-1500w (Cheaper to get two 750w) (Even cheaper to get three 500w) (Even cheaper to get four 400w)


For the 7970 HD Radeon cards (230w run - 250w max)
Also with standard CPU, with SSD or USB-drive or low-power HD, ~ 65w normal operation (45w for low-power models, or disabled cores.)
* If you have many HD's and a super-CPU, overclocked.. water-cooled, add 100-200w to all these "max" values. (That is just stupid. lol.)
1x = 250w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 315w MAX (Rec 400-450w)
2x = 500w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 565w MAX (Rec 650-700w or 2@ 400w-card/cpu/mobo + 300-350w-card)
3x = 750w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 815w MAX (Rec 900-1000w or 3x 350-400w)
4x = 1000w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 1065w MAX (Rec 1100-1200w or 2x 550-650w)
5x = 1250w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 1315w MAX (Rec 1400-1500w or 2x 750-850w)
6x = 1500w GPU + 65w CPU/mobo = 1565w MAX (Rec 2x 900-1000w)

Less, and you get less... Pay strong attention to the +12v power. Many put a lot of power on +5v, because that is cheap to do, and is for "USB and SATA and HD" powers. (Eg, if you have 4 HD's and many USB crap things... As opposed to having 3+ video-cards, which is "abnormal" for a CPU marketing item.)

Multi-rail is just stupid. You will never "match" rails to GPU's, or power... Thus, you will short yourself amps, or overload one rail, thus, "stupid" by design. (Except a system designed to have 25a on any rail, with 4 rails, but only has 60a available total, on all rails. That is a "smart" design, if it identifies the four separate rails, and has one dedicated to just the mobo/cpu.)

Don't worry, the new 12v only PSU's are coming. No more crappy 3.5v and 5v and -12v rails... Just 12v rails and an 11v (stand-by power). That is where you will see a major gain and reduced PSU size/heat/losses.

I managed to get 1-2 minutes of BTC mining before the unit blew it's guts... I noticed the hot card was only pulling around 590MH/s whereas the other card started @ 650MH/s. I would have tried scrypt mining but alas I didn't get a chance to before the PSU decided to fail.


On idle, the top card was @ 47C and the bottom one 40C. Once I started mining, both began to increase temps as normal except that the top one jumped to 80C almost immediately while the bottom one was still at ~65C. Within say ~30 seconds the top card had hit 99C and the bottom card was just about to hit 75C before the system shutdown.


This one seems neither heavy nor light... Actually it feels lighter than it should be for what it's 'rated' at. My Lian-Li 650w has been going great guns and is rather heavier than this cheapo CoolerPower.


Looking through the vents on the PSU with a cree torch I can't really see any burning or blown capacitors tho I don't want to open it up just yet to really have a look before as it's going back to the store over the weekend.


Ultimately, I'd like more power... overkill or not I do have the 990FXA mobo and was thinking eventually to add more cards on powered risers but that idea is shelved for a while at least till I can sort out the current issues. This dodgy PSU is 80+ certified tho as with the rest of the info listed on the unit, I call BS - This reminds me of an upgrade I done to my now defunct Compaq Presario some 7 or so years ago. I kept the PSU which was just a shitty 250W rated one but everything it powered (Intel e8400, 8GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer RAM few sata HDD) was running sweet as a nut. I threw everything at that system and it never skipped a beat... I've never had an issue with any Antec I've bought and still have a 350W SmartPower PSU that was running an old AMD Athlong 64 rig. I used it last night to trial the paper clip test with

I'm thinking of grabbing either the HCP-1000, Seasonic X-1250 or perhaps Silverstone 1500w. The downtime on this rig atm is rather depressing mainly because I can't do anything really till I go back to the store and grab another PSU.


Don't worry, I'm pretty pissed off myself... I mean I could have gone to the casino and blown 1k easily and probably got more in return than what is happening currently. I got the unit for $89 on sale, but it's $127 atm. It's the cheapeast purchase I've made on a PSU in my 20 or so years of building PC's. I was just a little retarded when deciding to buy it due to it being on sale at the time and that decision has probably cost me alot more than I'd bargained for... None the less, I've sent off an email to the store and await their reply heh.

A PSU also should not be light.  If you pick up a 900W power supply and it feels light it is probably crap.  Pushing out high power takes serious components that have weight to em.  I have found some off brand supplies that have done well, like Rocketfish.  I get Rocketfish 900W supplies and treat them like 700W units.  Out of 6, not have died over two years.

I don't buy a PSU unless Jonny Guru has tested it, if you buy a garbage one it can damage all your hardware.
I usually stick to Corsair / Seasonic / Lepa / Enermax models.

dude, NEVER FUCKING BUY a bargain priced PSU thats of no brand, especially a cheapass highwattage PSU..
Their a flatout lie, and yes they can get away w/ it for some reason legally...no fucking idea why, it should be fucking outlawed to lie that much to a customer.
But yes, manufactures often can fake the logos for many of the certifications they have to pass to be 'safe'
Such as UL etc...
There are cheap high watt PSUs all over the place that make me fucking pissed off. They can handle most like maybe 200watts when they are labeled 600+ watts.
On top of that .. the shit PSUs feed horrible quality DC to your PC components...causing all sorts of stress on their VRMs ... its a sad situation.

It sounds like that card's the problem.  I don't think it should hit 99C within seconds.  I doubt the PS would cause that.

I'm running three 7950's on a 750w PSU.
These cards (or the 70's) don't use that much power at all.
Your PSU was bad.

I have 4 x 7950 and when they mine bitcoin consumption from wall is around 850-900W depending on clocks, but when I tried scrypt on semi aggresive settings it pulled over 1000W from wall. So be careful when mining scrypt as it drains more power.

Without actually testing the hardware itself I couldn't tell you, but this really sounds like a capacitor blowing (which if the rest of the components did their job correctly, saved any hardware aside from the PSU from getting fried).  Just to throw my hat in the ring, I would personally recommend checking out Antec's lines of PSUs.  I have a PSU from their "TruePower" line in my main desktop, but that's just because it runs quiet (I designed my whole system to run silent under full load without any acoustic padding or water cooling, so this was a must).

As far as projects though, I am using one of their higher-end models.  It might be overkill (for both my purposes and yours) but I would suggest at least checking it out - HCP-1000 Platinum.  This particular PSU actually has 4 dedicated 12v rails in case you ever want to get crazy with more cards.  A great thing too is it really is an investment product.  All of Antec's PSUs come with a modular cable design, but this unit and a few others are actually future proof when it comes to the needs of motherboards and other hardware that has yet to be released.  I've really thrown a lot at mine (more than I should to be honest, but I figure with a 7-year replacement warranty, why not? =p).  Also since you'll likely be running your system 24/7, it's nice that it's 80 PLUS Platinum certified (that basically means that there is very little power that goes to waste due to heat or power leaks).  Again, we're looking at an extreme version; but I would never buy a PSU that wasn't at least 80 PLUS Bronze certified.  If you decide you need less power they have lots of different models with various features (what everyone recommended above is golden info).

For a more cost effective model that should do by you just as well, I'd go with EVGA's SuperNOVA 1000 G2.  We actually use these PSUs inside the workstations in the rendering lab (dual nVidia Quadro 6000s setup in SLI; it's actually pretty cool because you can make the system think you just have one powerful GPU - bleh forgot, this is BCT, no one cares about nVidia  ); anyway they are rock-solid, solid Japanese capacitors just like Antec uses, 10 year replacement warranty and is 80 PLUS Gold rated.  Hope that helps some!

I agree totally, just don't blow your shit up like I did on account of not fully checking what you're buying!


Right, well at least I have some reassurance that what I thought I was buying should have been ample for the rig. I just really, really, REALLY hope the PSU was all that went... I'll take my cards with me when going to the store and see if they can chuck them in a system to test for me while I hunt down a new PSU. If they are toast, then I can deal with that problem while I'm there rather than finding out later on that they're foobar'd.

Lots of really good info on this thread for a relative noob like myself,
Thanks very much fellas.

Kev

I run similar - [email protected], 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 6x120mm fans (Scythe Gentle Typhoon), HD7950, HD6970, HD5870, HD7770 all off a 1000W Zalman PSU that I got used off eBay for basically nothing.  The Zalman's fan barely spins, and it runs cool.  It's drawing 800W from the mains doing BTC, about 900W doing LTC.

I think your PSU was just a bit crap to blow up like that.

Yes it was ok for scrypt as well, though the power went up by another 80W. Single rail is vital. I was worried since they were all mounted directly on the motherboard instead of powered risers that the motherboard would fry, but I never really mined scrypt for very long except for testing (since I only believe in bitcoin). The PSU was fine though. Seasonic PSUs are excellent.

I figured it was total of the card itself but ofc I could be wrong.. None the less, it's hard to imagine I'd reach even close to 1Kw with the current mining rig.

AMD AM3 FX-8350 Black Edition (Eight -Core 4.0 GHz)
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
16GB G.Skill 1600Mhz
2*7970's
1*SATA 160GB
1*Pioneer DVD Burner
1*Wireless Netgear WG311 Card
Sharkoon T9 Value Case with 3*120mm LED Fans that came with it.
Powercooler CoolerPower 1050w Extreme Power (Dodgy) PSU

I'm leaning towards it not being able to draw nearly close to what it's advertised as being able to output... My desktop rig has been rock solid for a good year now and it's got a considerably less rated PSU tho somewhat decent and running enough devices/apps to keep a small nerd farm happy for a while...

Core i7 950
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
12GB Corsair XMS 2133Mhz
1*Nvidia GTX570
6*SATA Drives 500GB-2TB (Non-Raid)
1*USB3.0 2TB External
1*USB3.0 micro usb cable charging my S3 as we speak
1*Pioneer DVD Burner
Logitec 1080p USB webcam
Canon MP970 Printer
Audio Jacks in use
Sexy Coolermaster Inferno USB mouse flashing it's sexy LEDS at me
Bog standard USB K/B
3*120mm LED case fans
Lian-Li Extreme Power 650w PSU

It's been mining for 3 months straight and is doing so as I type this reply... I game with this machine while mining on occasion too with little effort. I can quite comfortably max out all settings while gaming and mine at the same time. Most of the time I forget I'm mining but am reminded as soon as I focus on the insanely loud fans on the GTX570 lol

Interestingly, the AMD's stock HSF is stupidly louder... I watched it rev upto 8K RPM while i was playing with fan speeds... the two 7970's were drowned out by this little jet engine and they both had their fans full blast

I couldn't say what the rails were reporting when I began mining on the AMD rig, but while idle installing windows updates, MSI afterburner, Catalyst and other shit before I tried mining, all the rails and voltage readings were on par. That is to say the 12v rail was steady.. Tho I just ripped the PSU out to take an image of the specs. It was a pain in the arse to install and hide the cables, even more of a pain in the arse to remove!!  My apologies it's a CoolerPower not PowerCooler! Still dodgy to f... heh.

Image of PSU Infos

What are your AMPS for the 12v...

I see many crappy PSU's that "max" at 1000w, but 30% of that is on the 3.3v and 5v rails... Totaly useless power.

EG, your 12v rails might only be 18-20a each... 2 of them... Thus, you only have 240w max, per rail... If you put one rail on BOTH cards, and the other was on your hard-drive... you tried to draw about 500W through one of the 240w rails, and fried the "rail-regulator" as it attempted to divert power from the other rail.

Always get mono-rails... It is useless getting split-rails, unless you exactly match the rails to the loads, which is impossible to actually do.

The cards pull 250w each, CONSTANT, and up to 300w peak, at 100% load. (Clock and voltage dependent.) That is at a constant 12v source... at 11.5v, it draws up to 350w peak.

I would be willing to bet your rails fell below 11v, due to load, and the amps fried it up good.

Find a good 48amp 12v rail for two cards... and 68amp 12v rail for three cards. Respectively (576w and 816w maxes, on JUST the 12v supply... thus a 650w and 1000w PSU.) Just to be, "Safe".

Or underclock, and use a kill-o-watt meter to "see" your actual at-wall-wattage, so you can use a cheaper PSU and run it under 200w each card, with a 500w PSU for two, and a 750w PSU for three cards.

NOTE: If you get a cheap PSU to operate the fans separately at 100%, you can remove them from the power-draw of your computer PSU, and use a real cheap PSU to power the cards. Because about 25w is just for the fans, on each card... up to 35w on the three-fan models. (2.08a to 2.91a, when fans run 100% through the controller and regulator, which lowers the boards available voltage also.) Save more money by using 120vAC fans, not 12vDC fans, which consume more power to do a lot less... EG, a bathroom exhaust blower fan.

You could use 2x 500w PSU's to power the whole system. $25 for each PSU... as opposed to 1x overpriced $250 1500w PSU.

Just to clear things up.

The Graphics card uses around 250 Watts.
There are other things in the system, that also use power, like the processor (CPU), ram, hard drives, motherboard etc.

So when they say power requirement, it's talking as a total of your system, not what is needed just for the graphics card.
It was technically suitable to get a 1000W PSU, the problem is that since it was an PSU from an unreliable source, it couldn't really cope with doing anywhere close to 1000W (lies on specifications). That is why you always make sure you get a quality PSU.

kevinm - Seasonic is a good PSU, so it should be fine to cope with 4 of those beasts, as long as you are not going over the top on the other components used with it. You bigger problem will be cooling them all, they'll generate a lot of heat.