I am planning at some point in the future to install a 9800 GX2 with quad SLi at some point. Problem, I am just wondering if it will fit inside a Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case.
oopss i just he had put 9600, not 9800gx2 yeah he will get 2 cards in there, resulting in in the quad sli
surely you want the length not the width though. the width of the case is the height of the card, they are perpendicular to each other
You will have to remove the HDD cage from the case - a single 8800GTS 320 (approx 250mm) fits just but blocks off two 3.5 bays, at 275mm the only way the GX2 will fit is to completely remove the cage and either mount your drives in the floppy bays (noisy as no damping) or in the 5.25. This is why I upgraded my case.
A noisy solution I see, but can you not also put anti-vibration on there, even if it is not on the HDD cage? Another thing is, Would I be able to fit in an Enermax Galaxy power supply in there, and how much Wattage would I need? What case did you upgrade to?
If you're happy to take a dremel/drill to your case you could enlarge the mounting holes for the floppy rack to fit the rubber grommets that hold the drives in to the lower cage. Alternately you could cut a chunk out of the hdd cage to fit the gfx card in. This would block two of the drive bays like it did in mine but still leave three available, although if you were planning on getting two cards in you'd lose space for 4 drives... Just got the tape measure out and it's 265mm from the pci blanking plate to the leading edge of the drive cage. As far as the Galaxies go the top panel usb/audio connectors protrude down into the case 195mm away from the back, the Galaxies are 220mm each. They will fit if you completely remove the top panel connectors and mounting bracket. Depends how much you use those usb ports. Are you upgrading your whole system or just the gfx card/s? My systems now in a Lian-Li PC-A16B, has the advantage that the hdd cage can be moved into any of the 9 5.25 bays and because it doesn't have a door its the same physical outer length with more room inside.
I am considering upgrade the whole system, since the case does not seem compatible with the setup I have in mind. Is there a particular minimum requirement I should meet when getting the case and power supply?
There's not really a minimum requirement per se other than the ATX spec, PSU wise will depend upon your intended components but you can't go wrong with the Corsair in my sig, whisper quiet and always one of the first recommendations around the forums, bit reviewed it a while back iirc. You can get an estimate of power draw using a PSU calculator. As far as cases it depends what you're looking for, silence, performance or aesthetics with the latter obviously being quite personal. Just read a few reviews before buying, most sites will comment whether Nvidia's latest behemoth will fit or not. Just watch out for placement of usb ports and features on the top as they will protrude inside.
Are you sure that you really want to fit two GX2 cards? One is hot, noisy and very power hungry but two will be bordering on ridiculous. I would seriously recommend that you reconsider and go for one decent card as SLI/Crossfire is not all its cracked up to be especially if you venture into quad territory. However if you absolutely, seriously must have quad GPU's (even if you do it with two GX2's) then can I suggest that you read the article on the Custom PC website where they recently ran a graphics super test specifically aimed at SLI/Crossfire setups and included triple and quad card combo's as well. If after reading that you still insist on going for dual GX2's then you really can't skimp on your PSU, the Enermax 1000 (got one and its fab) was the king of the hill for about 2yrs but it has now been usurped by the new Corsair 1000W. The last thing you need inside your case is a straining PSU, you should aim to have one with outstanding stability, plenty of rails to support all of the current you will be drawing and a stupendously well ventilated case with very neat cable management. If you overtax a poor/insufficient PSU then it will dump a lot of heat as it sweats to keep up with the load, add to this the large heat build up from the GPU's, your processor cooler and if you're really pushing things, heat from your RAM, then you will have a pretty serious amount of waste heat to deal with and you'll need a good thermal management plan to take care of it.
+1 A guy on the custom pc forums recently put two GX2's in a lian li and ended up selling one because they were running at 100C!!!11!! Seriously i have heard of nothing but problems with quad sli. Another friend of mine tried it with the 7950GX2 and said he may aswell have chucked £300 down the drain for the performance increase he got
Yep, I wasn't going to mention this but the Custom PC supertest said basically the same thing. The performance increase from multiple GPU setups does not justify the effort and cost involved, in some cases there was actually a performance hit of about 50% (worst case scenario) on one set up - can't remember which but its all on the website. Another thing that was included at the end of the article was a brief interview with some bods from both Nvidia and ATI about their driver support for multi-GPU set ups. If the results of the supertest didn't put you off SLI/Crossfire then the interviews should. To say the driver support is diabolical is a bit of an understatment.
