550W PSU enough for R9 290 video card?

[NinjaKolla]

I have a Seasonic G Series 550W Gold PSU, will I be able to run a Gigabyte R9 290 overclocked video card with this PSU?

My other specs:
Intel Core i5 4570 CPU
Gigabyte Sniper B5 motherboard
single stick of 8GB @ 1600MHz
128GB SSD
WD Blue 1TB HDD + WD Green 3TB HDD

 

[JoneD]

Yes, Seasonic makes quality PSU's and 550w is more than enough to run a single R9 290.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

650 watts is recommended for the 290 and the 290X.

http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm

The Seasonic G is indeed excellent. But the 290 can pull 340 watts all by itself. Add in some overclocking and that can jump to 365 watts. That does not leave you enough headroom with a 550w power supply.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-and-290x,3728-4.html

 

[JoneD]

@anort3 that's not true. My mate is running similar setup with R 290 on a 500w PSU.

 

[Cons29]

my 3 cents, get a higher capacity psu. i would not risk it (as much as i love seasonic)

 

[Deleted member 217926]

@anort3 that's not true. My mate is running similar setup with R 290 on a 500w PSU.

Look at the numbers Tom's came up with in testing. Your buddy's 500w power supply is not going to last very long. Hope it's a good one so that when it dies it doesn't take parts with it.

 

[Moonstick2]

650 watts is recommended for the 290 and the 290X.

http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm

The Seasonic G is indeed excellent. But the 290 can pull 340 watts all by itself. Add in some overclocking and that can jump to 365 watts. That does not leave you enough headroom with a 550w power supply.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-and-290x,3728-4.html

That data looks more like noise to my trained eye - there's no relation between adjacent points, and how likely is it that a card at full pelt will happen to draw more-then-less-then-more-then-less-then-more each millisceond and so on to the tune of +/- 100W or more? Looks to me like someone plugged their probes into their oscilloscope and took the numbers coming out as gospel.

That aside, cards might spike but in the same way for good PSUs the spec shouldn't be taken as a hard limit:

http://hardwareinsights.com/wp/seasonic-g-450-review/2/ - Seasonic 450W found capable of supplying a steady 540W
http://hardwareinsights.com/wp/thermaltake-tpg-650w-review/4/ - Thermaltake 650W found capable of 800W
http://hardwareinsights.com/wp/corsair-vs450-review/4/ - Corsair 450W capable of 500W
http://hardwareinsights.com/wp/power-logic-magnum-pro-315-power-supply-review/5/ - Cheap 315W does 320W and goes bang when overrun.

Anandtech gave a total average system consumption at high demand of < 400W (http://anandtech.com/show/7481/the-amd-radeon-r9-290-review/15) for an R9 290 system. Even believing the 1 ms spike of an extra 100W would mean < 500W draw. The rest of the system would have also have to spike from 150W to 200W during that exact same millisecond (1ms either side and the GPU draw is likely down below 200W according to those plots) for the total to hit 550W, and even then a quality PSU will have an extra 50-100W overhead to cope.

The 550W powering my R9 290 hasn't gone pop yet, despite all the apparent spikes in power draw it must've seen. If it does though, I'll be sure to report it in the interests of evenhandedness.

 

[Vic 40]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-and-290x,3728-4.html

Are you sure that this is just the card? Not the entire system,because at anandtech they get the same wattages for a whole system with an Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz.

I too think that 550watts should be enough.You need to take into account that the system of the o.p. uses an i5 4570 which just doesn't use as much as an amd FX or socket 2011 cpu.