 Power consumption is always a big one, so you can see my system with the Radeon 6870 pulls about 300 watts from the wall when I've got it under a full firm arc load now What we might want to do just for comparison sake is fire up prime 95 Give that CPU a little bit of stress so this should represent about what kind of a power supply You should be looking at for remember. This is quite a basic system, and this is an 80 plus silver power supply So that's a best-case scenario, but you should be using for an SSD a couple four gigs of RAM Quad core this is an 875 K processor overclocked and then a stock speed 6870 You're looking at about 400 watts from the wall So you want to buffer that make sure you got at least kind of a 500 to 600 watt power supply and then scale from there Accordingly to whatever else you want to add to it So I'll give you some comparison numbers against the 5870 as well as the GTX 480 Just so you have some context for that because remember every system is going to be a little bit different But okay, so hold on let me do some quick math here, so But 90% so we're probably pulling about 360 watts from the power supply right now Okay, as soon as you start adding more drives and stuff you might see that jump up to about 400 watts so Giving the power supply some time to degrade etc etc a 500 watt power supply is probably about what I'd recommend for this Power consumption for the 5870 as you can see is quite a bit higher than the 6870 now it is a faster card, but I don't think it's Well, I guess it's pretty proportional remember the 5870 and the 6870 are built using the same Manufacturing process so that means that unlike some generational leaps you can't just you know stuff twice as many Transistors into the same die size and then Just call it okay now. It's twice as powerful, so it's not really that simple This is more of an evolutionary step rather than a revolutionary step So I just wanted to show you those power consumption numbers really quick This is Furmark with prime 95 running so with for this card Yeah, you'd need another 50 to 75 watts of available power on your power supply Remembering that if you're me you're usually over buying on the power supply So that it'll run nice and quiet because most power supplies will ramp up the fan Much more aggressively past about 50 to 60 percent load With prime 95 and Furmark running at the same time with the GTX 480 we're looking at about 550 watts from the wall which means that that power supply is providing about 500 watts So if you had a 500 watt power supply with a GTX 480 a 3.8 gigahertz overclocked quad and SSD blah blah blah Etc about this build then you'd be stressing it to the max when you're under extreme load that fan Is gonna ramp right up really for a system like this Something like what I'm using in here, which is an 80 plus silver Cougar 850 watt power supply is a very good choice Because it'll also give you the the headroom to add another GTX 480 later on if you wanted although at that point you'd probably be pulling about 600 or so watts from the wall and Yeah, even that's I guess that's fine for a 50 watt 80 plus silver power supply should be alright But ideally as I said before you want your power supply doing about 50 60 percent duty Maybe 75 percent under and I you know an extreme load scenario like a Furmark plus prime 95 I mean how often are you you know rendering video with four quarters while you game you know so So 75 percent load is probably what I would target to ensure that doesn't get too loud Thanks for checking out my video on the heat and Temperature or rather on the power consumption of the GTX 480 Radion 5870 and the brand new Radion 6870