Question Psu ramping up when gaming

[Dreadbeard]

I need some advice, when im gaming - when my GPU hits around 80c ish my PSU fan ramps up "i know its not the gpu fan as ive tested it with the gpu fan set at low - it ramps up for around 1-5 seconds and gets loud then goes back to basicly silent - im using a be quite system power 9 bronze 700w psu - i have taken the psu out slightly and dusted it to best of my ability im not sure if its any thing to be concerned about or not?

Also to add to this - i heard that if a gpu gets hot it causes it to use more power which would make the psu ramp up too? is this true?

 

[bill001g]

That likely is exactly the correct theory. People who live where it is cold would like a magic source of heat that does not use more power. In the end your computer is converting all the electricity to heat or maybe a bit of light from the display.

Now why the fan spins up and down so fast that depends on the power supply. I don't think you can change the fan curves on power supplies. Mine seems to have 2 or 3 speeds. It is mostly off and when I use game that use a lot of resources the fan comes on but it is still low. It can run faster but I have only seen it do that when I first boot the machine from a complete power off.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

When the GPU gets hot the fans spin faster and use more power. Your PSU then produces more heat from converting more power to the system, and since your PSU fan is temperature controlled it is causing your PSU fan to spin up and get a little noisy. You have a budget-oriented PSU with a somewhat noisy fan.

 

[Dreadbeard]

Okay so it isnt strictly anything to worry about? as it wasnt doing this a few months ago and i dont recall it happening before winter either, but im guessing its okay and isnt a cause for alarm?

 

[Dreadbeard]

Asking a follow up question here as i have had a sudden thought - is my 700w PSU good enough for running my system? or should i look at upgrading? - to add to this, i have 1 NVME drive, 2 SSd drives, 2 HDD drrives and a external drive - someone somewhere mentioned maybe im at the limit of the psu?

 

[bill001g]

Should be fine. You can look up the cpu and video card max usage but a generic 3070 only needs 220 watts.

 

[Dreadbeard]

Should be fine. You can look up the cpu and video card max usage but a generic 3070 only needs 220 watts.

My GPU states graphics card power 220wand cpu tdp is 105w gpu reccomended psu is 650w

 

[bill001g]

Should be good enough. The 650 number has extra margin of error and you have 700.

 

[Dreadbeard]

Okay thanks! i wasnt sure if maybe i was topping out the usage on the psu and thats why it keeps ramping its fan up crazy like - i guess its just because of the ambient temps here atm being around 25 c

 

[DSzymborski]

I gotta be honest, I am not personally a fan of using a PSU like this with something higher-end like a 3070. The problem's not so much the wattage but that's a really old platform. Thankfully, it's not group-regulated, but it does use double-forward topology on the primary, meaning you get the awkward switching, the inefficiency, and increased noise, plus the caps are only middling. This isn't a junk PSU, but its really better suited for budget builds, not modern 70-and-up Nvidia skews that can be really quite spiky with the power.

 

[Dreadbeard]

I gotta be honest, I am not personally a fan of using a PSU like this with something higher-end like a 3070. The problem's not so much the wattage but that's a really old platform. Thankfully, it's not group-regulated, but it does use double-forward topology on the primary, meaning you get the awkward switching, the inefficiency, and increased noise, plus the caps are only middling. This isn't a junk PSU, but its really better suited for budget builds, not modern 70-and-up Nvidia skews that can be really quite spiky with the power.

I understand, i got this as a pre-built system a couple years back i think 2021 ish, upgraded the ram recently from the 16gb it had to 64gb, so im aware the psu is likely dated and could be better, im going to look into upgrading the psu if i can get a company to upgrade it for me "i dont want to fiddle with this pc that much i suck at cable management" and maybe a new case, as this one really isnt suited that well as the airflow is meh