Can your power supply effect your overclock?

Dayle McNeela

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Jul 17, 2013
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If you have a low quality power supply (right amount of wattage but cheap PSU) will it affect my overclock?

I was to overclock my i5 3570K on an ASRock Z77 Pro4-m motherboard...

Ill be using a Corsair CX500w Modular...

Any feedback is much appreciated!!!
 
Solution
It wont effect standard Ocing. It will only effect you if you are trying to squeeze every last bit from your cpu and break ocing records.

If you just want to do a modest oc, it should be fine, however a cheap psu may not deliver very clean voltages and my put extra strain on your mobos power regulation components, effectively reducing its life span.

if you are using the corsair cx, you should know its not a low quality psu. its midrange psu and it should be perfectly fine for OCing.
 


Ill be using the EVGA GTX 760 overclocked with ACX dual fan cooler... (uses 170watt max)
I want to overclock from stock (3.4GHz) to 4.4GHz?
 


My i5 3570K is 3.4GHz at stock, I plan to overclock to 4.0-4.4GHz... I do hear that you can OC this CPU to 4.8GHz but i wont be going that high...
You should also know I am using a single GPU in my system also... (EVGA GTX760 ACX)
 


It should be okay, but you may have problems with your power supply not having enough wattage/amps. You will be/are putting a lot of strain on your psu.
 


Can I ask why I might not have enough wattage/amps?
My GPU will use 170watt MAX (according to NVidia)
My CPU will use like 77watt (possible 100watt when OCd?)
HDD and SDD cant use much surely? say 20watts
Motherboard... say 50watts
Cooling fans... say 50watts

thats 390watts?
 
If your PSU is decent (which it is) then it wont affect your standard overclocking, its only when your at the top end of overclocking that you need rock-solid voltage outputs too maintain an overclock.

The CX500 is enough for what your after, general rule of thumb if it has the connectors for it, it can output the wattage for it. Its only when your adapting connectors where you want to be adding up wattages.
 


Wattage is not the only factor. A 760 needs 30A on the 12 v rail and your psu has 38. ocing will probably need maybe 34A which is getting close to the 38A limit. Again, I am no saying its not going to work, just saying you are putting a lot of strain on your psu. Its never good for psu to be running near 100% load, since it degrades the life of its components. If you check similar threads, you will see that the minium recommend psu for such a system would be 550W with 600W being a good psu with some safety margin.
 
Solution


Many thanks for your help.
As I said, I need a cheap and cheerful PSU for now atleast, if i notice any issues, I will upgrade as soon as I can :)