Question Avoid spikes ?

[Azowel]

Hi,
I bought the corsair SF750 with the Sapphire Nitro+ 6950XT

https://fr.pcpartpicker.com/list/sLCb78

On average "maximum" my setup is supposed to do not reach a higher wattage than 668W so my 750W PSU is enough.
However, we know that there are some spikes on GPUs, and according to this review:

Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure Review

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT Pure is a new addition to Sapphire's lineup that comes with a sexy white color theme. In our review, we find out that the card not only looks great, but the quad-slot cooler achieves fantastic noise levels which make 4K gaming at 60 FPS a whisper-quiet experience.

www.techpowerup.com

It can reach until 531W, maybe even more ?
Does it matter if there are some spikes that reach more than 750W ?
Do you know how to avoid these spikes ? Are there some settings ?
Thank you very much.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The only thing I can think of to avoid, but not completely get rid of, power spikes is to have a frame rate limiter of some kind set.

You can see in the review you linked at the VSync test, while the card has some spikes and a wide range of power consumption, it's still well below what the card would've drawn in a stress test. Now obviously you may not want to limit your card to 60 FPS/Hz, but it's one way of making sure your card isn't going to have a spike that potentially trips OCP/OPP.

 

[klavs]

I never owned a Corsair PSU, but I can see that your PSU is platinum. The high quality Seasonic PSU's I've seen tested can reach approximately 100 Watts higher than advertised.

If I am misinformed, please correct me.

 

[Azowel]

The only thing I can think of to avoid, but not completely get rid of, power spikes is to have a frame rate limiter of some kind set.

You can see in the review you linked at the VSync test, while the card has some spikes and a wide range of power consumption, it's still well below what the card would've drawn in a stress test. Now obviously you may not want to limit your card to 60 FPS/Hz, but it's one way of making sure your card isn't going to have a spike that potentially trips OCP/OPP.

Ok, so it happens only with high refresh rate ?
What if I set a 60Hz limit but I'm running my GPU in 4K with RT on with the 60Hz limit (which I won't reach of course) ? Would I have some high spikes ?

 

[klavs]

Ok, so it happens only with high refresh rate ?

It can happen regardless of your framerate when the game or other processes needs to load a lot data or do a lot of processing. For example when the game changes scenes, or you enter an area with a lot more voxels/polygons/whatever.

 

[Azowel]

It can happen regardless of your framerate when the game or other processes needs to load a lot data or do a lot of processing. For example when the game changes scenes, or you enter an area with a lot more voxels/polygons/whatever.

Ok, that is an issue ... Making a powerful card if we can't run it with a normal PSU is stupid ... It is stupid to buy a 1000W PSU for few milliseconds of high power while 99.9% of the time 750W is enough ...
Stupid GPU makers. I checked all the reviews on 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, it seems that there are much less spikes than the previous gen.

 

[blacknemesist]

Ok, that is an issue ... Making a powerful card if we can't run it with a normal PSU is stupid ... It is stupid to buy a 1000W PSU for few milliseconds of high power while 99.9% of the time 750W is enough ...
Stupid GPU makers. I checked all the reviews on 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, it seems that there are much less spikes than the previous gen.

Don't forget you should have actual room f 100w+ so you don't stress the PSU out, the more % usage the less efficient it is and it will degrade faster. Your PSU is only about 10% of the total cost of the system, you can easily push it to 200euros and go for a 850w model. My advice is to bite the bullet and rest easy that the system will be balanced. You can also underclock the GPU to prevent higher spikes although those will still happen I believe.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Power spikes are a thing but I think that the risk that they pose has been a bit overblown. I say this because for well over a year I ran twin R9 Furies on an ASRock X370 Killer SLI motherboard with an R7-1700 CPU. I had several hard drives and a DVD-RW drive. The PSU that I used was my OCZ Z1000M 1kW 80+Gold-Certified from 2011.

Those two cards together have a TDP of 550W but I never once encountered a hiccup. Then I saw that Newegg had a stupidly-low price on the EVGA 1000 G2 Supernova so I grabbed one and the OCZ Z1000M became my backup PSU. Having a backup PSU with the same specs as your main (Modular, 1kW, 80+Gold) is a very reassuring situation to be in.

When I got my RX 6800 XT, I paid way too much for it so I threw together a makeshift mining rig in an attempt to re-coup some of it. These were the specs:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FX
• CPU: FX-4350* (8350 w/4 cores disabled, 65W TDP)
• Video Card 1: RX 6800 XT (300W TDP)
• Video Card 2: RX 5700 XT (225W TDP)
• WD Blue 2TB 5400RPM SATA-III HDD
• OCZ Z1000M PSU

I mined with that rig 24/7 for 6 months with no power issues whatsoever despite that PSU being, at the time, over 10 years old. So while it's clear that these spikes exist, I believe that a high-quality PSU will be able to handle them without issue.