After a quick look I would say that the PSU is probably a bit over sized for the use case, even with both GPUs going full blast, they aren’t going to top 200w
the CPU you’ve chosen will add 65W, the spinning rust 20W max each when writing at full speed and the 970 evo is less than 10W
All together 335W, the motherboard will eat a couple watts so 350W is probably the max consumption of the machine
PSU like RM650x is closer to the optimum choice as you will then more likely hit closer to the ~50% power usage when doing lots of stuff resulting in best efficiency for the PSU when it converts mains to the voltages the machine wants.
Ultimately it doesn’t really matter, the 750w is also a fine choice.
Good point, given the efficiency curves of most power supplies. I will probably stick with the 750W version however, just so I have a little bit of wiggle room to add further hardware in the future - most likely another couple of HDDs and a 1GB Intel NIC.
As was mentioned in passing in my OP, I have decided to forego the Meshify, even though I am quite fond of Fractal Design cases, and use a 4U rack mount one I have sitting around instead. I will also reuse the three WD 1TB Red spinners I currently have sitting around doing nothing, and will use the savings to upgrade the CPU to a 2700X. I have already replaced the generic fans in the rack case with beige beauties from Noctua, and added a five bay hot swap unit, so as soon as everything else arrives I should be good to go.
Thank you for the clarification. You’re onto a good thing and I’m sure the boss will be impressed with that NVME. If I had to do it all over again I’d get away from mechanical drives completely. After running 4X250 GB SSD in RAID 10 it behooves me to suggest that this could make for a fine local backup when the data is regularly being moved to the cloud anyway. But I have no idea how much data we are talking about in your case and I realize you’re on a budget. I thought RAID 10 would really make for slow backups when I first opted for it but I took a chance anyway and I’m not at all disappointed. As far as backups are concerned RAID 10 suits my purposes and yeah I know RAID is not backup (but I backup my backup so it’s really a backup) :::grins::: On a side note AMAZON offers prices that are competitive with NewEgg and at least in Canada they have a pretty respectable return policy. (I guess it helps when you have a store room full of parts handy in the event something goes wrong. I managed to save a PC at my wife’s employer’s Lab because I collect parts.) If I could not get a Seasonic PSU I’d probably opt for Corsair (platinum of course) but EVGA has really been pulling up in the ranks for tough and reliable PSUs at affordable prices. You might want to look into EVGA.