So the 6770 i just bought needs a 450 watt PSU

I foolishly didn't check what the specs of my current PSU were and installed the card anyway only to find out mine is a 400 watt.

However my computer appears to be running fine with it. There is no serious amount of heat coming from anywhere and the performance is a lot better on games. The bigger issue is that this is a PSU which came with this ready built PC about 6 or 7 years ago, so it's very likely not even capable of 400 watts anymore.

Is it possible that the 6770 has inflated requirements or am I just lucky? What possible damage is this causing?

PS... I have ordered a new PSU for the sake of not pushing that aforementioned luck.

Perhaps 450w covers peak wattage needs. I have a similar 5770 and I'm using a CoolerMaster 430w PSU. It's paired with a 65w low-power Celeron E3400. No problems.

I have a Q6600 and four sticks of 1GB ram... Not sure what the power draw is on ram but the Q6600 might be high for a CPU.

Psu requirements are always overstated to anticipate for lower tiers psu, safety, blahh. Dont worry about it if that works.

Cpu+gpu takes up the bulk of wattage usage, all other parts takes little enough to not worry about in general.

I have a gtx 555 on a 330w psu. You should be fine.

I'm running an OCed 6850 on a 375 watt PSU. Yeah, you'll be good.

I foolishly didn't check what the specs of my current PSU were and installed the card anyway only to find out mine is a 400 watt.

However my computer appears to be running fine with it. There is no serious amount of heat coming from anywhere and the performance is a lot better on games. The bigger issue is that this is a PSU which came with this ready built PC about 6 or 7 years ago, so it's very likely not even capable of 400 watts anymore.

Is it possible that the 6770 has inflated requirements or am I just lucky? What possible damage is this causing?

PS... I have ordered a new PSU for the sake of not pushing that aforementioned luck.

Leejjohno

If you're fine right now, make sure you don't add additional power-hungry components like extra internal hard/optical drives, expansion cards, etc.

The 6770 has very minimal power requirements. You should be fine. I've heard of people running those on 380W PSUs like the Antec Earthwatts 380D without issue.

i'm running 2 670s in SLI, with a I7 2600k, on some energon cubes I found! :P