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I have an old graphics card and am planning to get a new GTX 970 card for my system. Right now I am not looking to go for SLI setup but in future I might. I am currently using a 650 watt power supply and I dont know if this will be able to support 2 cards although I know that it will support atleast 1 card for sure. So my question is whether my old PSU will be able to handle GTX 970 SLI or should I have to buy another high wattage power supply? Thanks for any information.
I would suggest you to go with atleast EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 750W power supply. Till the time you are not going to apply SLI setup, you are tension free to use your old 650Watt power supply without any issues with one single card but if you choose to run 2 card at a time then you will need a good power supply like the one that I have mentioned. This PSU comes with 80 plus Gold compared to the bronze one's and also with a lot of cables. And it also comes with a 10 year warranty as well.
Even if you have a high quality power supply of 650 watts, which makes it more comfortable to work with any single card but still you should not SLI those graphics card with anything below a 750W PSU. You should try to get a high quality 750w or 850w PSU to power both the video cards along with all other components like Intel i-core processor and memory. I have read that the minimum recommended power for a single card is 30A and if there are 2 of them then it will require atleast 60A.
The GTX 970 card requires atleast a 145watts maximum power as per what Nvidia has to say. They have also recommended a 500 watt power supply with 28amps on the +12V rail to run the whole computer hardware if running single GTX 970 card with no overclocking. While at full load the GTX 970 will not be able to take more than a little over 24amps, leaving the rest of the power for the system. So, it will be good to get atleast a 750W power supply for 2 cards in SLI.