My upgrade plan for AMD....

Wildside

Hellfire!
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Riverside, CA
I'm concerned about power draw and my maximum wattage of my PSU. 860W. I researched some info and concerned about how many watts I already draw up to max load. All in my signature is still valid except for some other info I left out: 5 AeroCool 120mm Shark fans (black), 1 AeroCool 140mm Shark (black) AeroCool Shark 120mm Blue Edition 120mm Case cooler-Newegg.com, NZXT SEN-MIX2 Sentry Mix 2 Fan Controller (30W per channel, 40-100% control NZXT SEN-MIX2 Sentry Mix 2 Fan Controller - Newegg.com, and LITE-ON Blu-ray drive and DVD drive (DVD drive has faster ripping).

I might be drawing about 400-500W already max. I plan on eventually buying a FreeSync 1440p IPS monitor down the road, which means that AMD RX 480 will fit that bill nicely and my hopes is to Crossfire it as well. 390W is what is needed to run them in Crossfire. When Zen is released and performed well in benchmarks, then I will switch over to it too (new mobo and DDR4 ram obviously). My biggest question is this: do i need to upgrade my PSU to support Crossfire with what my setup is now or I should still be good? Removing a drive, switching lower powered fans and taking out one completely is no problem if needed.

UPDATE:

If I don't get the RX 480 8GB Crossfire, then maybe 1 GTX 1070 would be fine for me. FreeSync vs G-Sync monitors is huge difference in price to each other and AMD route is the cheapest. Too bad Doom OpenGL doesnt support SLI or Crossfire :(.
 
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Doom has somewhat SLI support; saw people on [H] posting about it saying they forced it and were using it.
 
Doom has somewhat SLI support; saw people on [H] posting about it saying they forced it and were using it.

Tweaking I'm sure. Vulkan patch is coming out soon and will boost performance for the RX 480. I am honestly trying to hold off for other partner's card for better cooling and OCing.
 
The 480 is a 150w TDP card. At most OC'd it'll take 166W while under Furmark load (which isn't realistic). Suffice to say under Crossfire loads it'll take realistically around 310W if that since scaling is never perfect. Your PSU is more than enough, and Zen later will take way less wattage than your current 8150 even if OC'd.

The only way you'll cross that GPU wattage barrier is if you buy an AIB card with more than a single 6pin and OC it. Problem is from what I'm seeing the 480 doesn't OC well.
 
I wouldn't worry about it seeing as AMD is releasing drivers to help negate that issue (The whole drawing way too much power from a PCIe slot), and I am sure manufactures will change the PCB and power delivery circuitry to keep from drawing too much in the future as well.


From my understanding, the only reason one would need to worry is if they have a cheap aged board and plan on trying to OC the GPU.
 
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