Go with the 850W as the 4070 needs at least 200W and it will leave room for future upgrades as well. Though if money is an issue the 750W should be enough for the system.
www.digitaltrends.com

Nvidia RTX 4070 vs. RTX 4070 Ti: don't buy the wrong GPU | Digital Trends

Between Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti and the recently-released RTX 4070, there's a clear winner for gamers looking to get the best bang for their buck.
www.digitaltrends.com www.digitaltrends.com
Just make sure to buy a good brand and not the lower end ones. I once bought a cheap 1000W on amazon and it burnt out after a couple of months. Only cost me $160 though.

:D
 
Pladio said:
Quick one - I did a NewEgg Power Calculator and it says I shouldn't need more than 600W of power. Would you think I could drop down to a 750W power supply and still be ok ? Or is it better to go 850W and be safe ?
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Well, there's usually not a huge difference in price between 650-750-850 PSUs. The review I read said the 4070 only needs a 650W PSU, but I would definitely go with an 850W if you want it to last.

I'll reiterate what Couch said about getting a good name brand. Not all PSUs are built the same, and stability is as important as the output. I really like Thermaltake myself.
 
Pladio said:
Quick one - I did a NewEgg Power Calculator and it says I shouldn't need more than 600W of power. Would you think I could drop down to a 750W power supply and still be ok ? Or is it better to go 850W and be safe ?
Click to expand...
This calculator is better than NewEgg's: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator
It gives 478W for your situation (and that's assuming 4070Ti since they don't have 4070 on their list yet).

850W is huge overkill but keep in mind that for the B650 board you're going to have two 12V EPS (CPU) connectors, so you need a power supply that has two. That usually means only 650W+, or even 750W+ in some product lines. Both are overkill for your case, so you could just go with whatever you can find on the low-wattage end that has the two connectors. Also like someone said, junky power supplies are terribly unreliable. Don't know much about Gigabyte, I only buy Seasonic or Corsair.
 
Also, you should be getting a Samsung 980 or 990 SSD, instead of a 970, since you're on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Transfer speed is about double and the price is not much different.
 
I don't think those PSUs are overkill. A 650W is recommended for the GPU he's getting, and he may want to upgrade it in the future and could need more power.

A good PSU can easily outlive your MB/CPU/GPU, so it's better to go with more Watts when in doubt.
 
JDR13 said:
I don't think those PSUs are overkill. A 650W is recommended for the GPU he's getting, and he may want to upgrade it in the future and could need more power.
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NVIDIA's recommendations are intentionally overkill. They want to make 100% sure that everything will work fine for you, without even knowing what CPU and other components you have. They have no choice but to make their recommendations overkill.

But yeah you're right, the price difference between 650 and 850 isn't much and a good PS will last forever (or at least until they introduce new connectors that don't exist on your PS). Just depends on how worried you are about saving a few bucks I guess.
 
It's hard to make recommendations if you're not planning on upgrading until the end of the the year because a lot can change (and also stay the same)

I've had the upgrade bug for a few months now and if I were to buy today or soon it would probably be some thing like this:

CPU - AMD 7600
MB - Many choices, I would stick with Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI
GPU - Radeon 7600xt or better for AMD, Nvidia 4060 (if it's available by the year end) or 3060 12GB
DDR5 - 32GB 5600 or 6000 (Gskill, Teamgroup)
SSD - WD 770 M2 or Crucial P3+ M2, 2GB
PSU - depends on the case and overall setup. Probably 750w minimum gold certified. Always go fully modular. Corsair, Seasonic have always been reliable for me. You can search for PSU tier lists.
 
Stingray said:
This calculator is better than NewEgg's: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator
It gives 478W for your situation (and that's assuming 4070Ti since they don't have 4070 on their list yet).

850W is huge overkill but keep in mind that for the B650 board you're going to have two 12V EPS (CPU) connectors, so you need a power supply that has two. That usually means only 650W+, or even 750W+ in some product lines. Both are overkill for your case, so you could just go with whatever you can find on the low-wattage end that has the two connectors. Also like someone said, junky power supplies are terribly unreliable. Don't know much about Gigabyte, I only buy Seasonic or Corsair.
Click to expand...

JDR13 said:
I don't think those PSUs are overkill. A 650W is recommended for the GPU he's getting, and he may want to upgrade it in the future and could need more power.

A good PSU can easily outlive your MB/CPU/GPU, so it's better to go with more Watts when in doubt.
Click to expand...

I found an EVGA Gold 750W one. All the reviews seem to suggest EVGA works well. I saw some bad reviews for Gigabyte ones and I think my current one is EVGA.

Stingray said:
Also, you should be getting a Samsung 980 or 990 SSD, instead of a 970, since you're on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Transfer speed is about double and the price is not much different.
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Thanks for the recommendation. I found a 980 SS for only £30 more. The 990 seems a tad overpriced and doesn't seem to provide much more of an efficiency gain to me. Unless I'm missing something.
skinnychicken said:
It's hard to make recommendations if you're not planning on upgrading until the end of the the year because a lot can change (and also stay the same)

I've had the upgrade bug for a few months now and if I were to buy today or soon it would probably be some thing like this:

CPU - AMD 7600
MB - Many choices, I would stick with Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI
GPU - Radeon 7600xt or better for AMD, Nvidia 4060 (if it's available by the year end) or 3060 12GB
DDR5 - 32GB 5600 or 6000 (Gskill, Teamgroup)
SSD - WD 770 M2 or Crucial P3+ M2, 2GB
PSU - depends on the case and overall setup. Probably 750w minimum gold certified. Always go fully modular. Corsair, Seasonic have always been reliable for me. You can search for PSU tier lists.
Click to expand...
Yes, I know. I'm a bit odd that way. Because I find my PC still works well enough for now, I don't see the point in upgrading today. But I also don't like making impulse buys, so that adds to researching things now. Of all the new games coming out this year, the most demanding one for me will likely be BG3 and that was running fine on my current set-up when I tried it out in EA.

The only games giving my machine trouble tend to be heavily modded Unity games (BattleTech - looking at you), which I think is due to the engine more than my set-up.


From what I've read - you may as well go for the 7600x as it's only $10 more or something and it's better.
I've never had an AMD GPU, so I feel a bit odd about changing to them. Most benchmarks I've seen show them underperforming compared to NVidia's lineup at same prices. The only exceptions seem to be games which a crapton of VRAM, which there aren't many as far as I know.

For RAM, I don't know how much the brands make a difference, but the one I found seems to have pretty good reviews.

PSU, as above, I'm looking at this:

Also, I found a case I like more, but it's more expensive: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07N1MBZ1W/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=AY4WCH984Q0C2&psc=1


Also, thank you everyone for the contributions. Much appreciated.
 
Pladio said:
Quick one - I did a NewEgg Power Calculator and it says I shouldn't need more than 600W of power. Would you think I could drop down to a 750W power supply and still be ok ? Or is it better to go 850W and be safe ?
Click to expand...

Maybe it's a bit late for a reply, but I'm always in favour of some margin, though that's a personal choice. I tend to keep my PCs for a long time and upgrade components multiple times in its lifetime - mostly the GPU since a CPU upgrade often requires a new motherboard. And upgrading a PSU is a real pain.

Also, I noticed you only had one SSD. At some point you might want to add another or a cheaper HD for storage that doesn't require insane speed.

The most important is the quality of the PSU though, and its power efficiency. Also related to that, it's worth checking a few advices regarding the 12VHPWR cables that have had quite a bad reputation (melting connectors and so on). I don't know how much of that is true but I'd definitely look into that before buying anything and mounting the PC (cable bending specs).

EDIT: one video on the subject:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZWwwHScaQ
 
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Without reading the last couple of posts:

I would strongly recommend not to buy an 8GB graphics card anymore. Through many test videos on YT it becomes clearer every week that cards with so little memory are living on borrowed time. Many new releases already need more than 8 GB VRAM when played at 1440p or 4k, and the demand increases if raytracing or other modern features are activated.
The situation will become much worse though, when the PS4 is left behind and true next gen game are being released. Then even 12 GB cards will reach their limit.
 
Gorath said:
Without reading the last couple of posts:

I would strongly recommend not to buy an 8GB graphics card anymore. Through many test videos on YT it becomes clearer every week that cards with so little memory are living on borrowed time. Many new releases already need more than 8 GB VRAM when played at 1440p or 4k, and the demand increases if raytracing or other modern features are activated.
The situation will become much worse though, when the PS4 is left behind and true next gen game are being released. Then even 12 GB cards will reach their limit.
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Yes I saw that too. However the only cards with more ram are the amd ones. So looking at the 7900 XT for now potentially.
 
Regarding AMD cards performing worse, I'd claim they perform about the same for the same price, but they have worse raytracing performance. So if you want rat tracing go Nvidia, otherwise go with whatever you like. And go with more than 8GB VRAM.

Regarding PSU wattage, I would go for a bit more than needed, due to the efficiency being higher the closer one comes to 50% load, meaning a little bit less heat in the case. With gold or better it's not really an issue, but I still like the feeling of my computer being a tiny bit more efficient.

I would personally go for the current gen AMD CPU, due to the available upgrade later, but the motherboards and ddr5 is still expensive. It's unlikely the CPU will be what limits your gaming for a very long time anyway.
 
Pladio said:
Yes I saw that too. However the only cards with more ram are the amd ones. So looking at the 7900 XT for now potentially.
Click to expand...
You might also want to consider the 6950 XT. It's $200-$300 cheaper than the 7900 XT and is still quite fast and has 16GB of ram.
 
You need to be extremely careful with choosing which components you want to have, because Microsoft has a very tight and very non-understandable list of components supported by Win11.
 
JDR13 said:
You might also want to consider the 6950 XT. It's $200-$300 cheaper than the 7900 XT and is still quite fast and has 16GB of ram.
Click to expand...
Two things to consider in addition to ram are the psu requirement and the length of the cards (if you have an itx case). While psu is talked about earlier both the 6950 and 7900 require (or at least recommend) substantially larger psu and are much longer than the 4070. The 4070 recommends a 650 while the 6950 and 7900 are recommend ~1000 watt psu ( you would have to read reviews for actual comparison of power consumptions somthing I didn't do for this post). Also with more wattage you end up with more heat.

My interest has been more limited in upgrading the gpu. I recently replaced the cpu when my old haswell mb died (they don't make those any longer rendering my i7 useless); but i still have an old 1070 in a nr200p case which is restricted to a sfx psu and 13 inch gpu. My psu is a platinum 750 (corsair); so the 6950/7900 are out of the question (ignoring their length); of course the 4700 only comes with 12 gb of ram which is a little less than one would prefer but probably fine for 1440p gaming - still i'm hopeful for a 4700 variant with more ram as I would like to upgrade the gpu next blackfriday. Gigabyte for example has a 16GB product listed (though I don't think it is yet available).

While your situation might be different at the end of the day you shoudl reconsider your psu and length requirement when making the final selection.
 
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notdart said:
While psu is talked about earlier both the 6950 and 7900 require (or at least recommend) substantially larger psu and are much longer than the 4070. The 4070 recommends a 650 while the 6950 and 7900 are recommend ~1000 watt psu
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Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. The 6950 XT has a PSU recommendation of 850W, and the 7900 XT is 750W.

Yes, the 4070 is a much smaller card, especially compared to the other 40xx series cards, and that's one of the things I like about it. However, the performance difference is also quite significant.
 
JDR13 said:
Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. The 6950 XT has a PSU recommendation of 850W, and the 7900 XT is 750W.

Yes, the 4070 is a much smaller card, especially compared to the other 40xx series cards, and that's one of the things I like about it. However, the performance difference is also quite significant.
Click to expand...
I took the values off the spec sheets (on newegg) for the models i looked at. While I did not intend to pick models with specify large psu; it is possible the ones i chose were overclocked or otherwise differed from stock. I have not yet check benchmark comparison between 6950/7900/4070 but will do so as we get closer to black-friday. My understading is the 4070 will be superior with ray tracing but not sure if that is a big deal these days - my guess is that it isn't.
 
notdart said:
I have not yet check benchmark comparison between 6950/7900/4070 but will do so as we get closer to black-friday. My understading is the 4070 will be superior with ray tracing but not sure if that is a big deal these days - my guess is that it isn't.
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It's not. The 4070 is more on par with the 6900 XT. The 4070 Ti is the competition for the 7900 XT.
 
I checked several psu power calculators and none are telling me I need more than 700W.
I would be suspicious of a card needing 1000W to be honest especially since the entire spiel has been the new ones are less power hungry than the old ones.
 
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