Quad SLI part deux: Build It Yourself

this is insane power...... i will just wait quietly until DX10 comes around. i am rich, but not that rich,

 

3 WORDS "I LOVE IT"

 

Madness. How many of you have your rig on for 6 hours a day or more? I bet it's quite a lot of you... now, how many of you would leave a 1Kw electric fire on for 6 hours? The results to your electricity bill will be the same. I've noticed quite a huge leap in my electricity bill since I built this rig, so I dread to think what that monster would do. I draw the line at that... it's just too expensive to run, and to stupid. Plus, I bet there's no easy watercooling solution either.

I'll wait for DX10. I'm already considering a rebuild using Core Duo 2 because it's cheaper to run as well as being faster, but I've no intention fo buying another power hungry GPU until we see what's coming next.

 

Its funny you should mention the electricity bills, ours went up quite a bit when I built my SLI rig and I've only got a 480W Tagan PSU!

 

I think power requirements are going up with next-gen GPUs.

 

Power usage is related to the components inside, and the power supply efficiency. As far as I know, if you're using a 480W PSU and loading it 100%, the efficiency is worse than a 1000W PSU with the same components and thus it will technically cost you more in terms of electricity bills.

With that said, I'm not saying that you should go out and buy a 1000W PSU, because they're expensive and certainly not quiet. However, getting a good quality PSU with very good efficiency will help to improve your electricity bills. If you're overloading a PSU, it's going to last less time too.

 

Agreed. As a quick and dirty example, a quick google search shows measured idle power consumption figures in this region:

2 x Reference NVIDIA 7800GTX 512's - 177W
1 x XFX's GeForce 7950GX2 XXX Edition - 154W​

So therefore, on idle, the quad SLI power consumption would be only 131 Watts (74%) higher than a pair of 7800GTX 512's.

On load, whe results were even more impressve:

Reference NVIDIA 7800GTX 512's - 401W
XFX's GeForce 7950GX2 XXX Edition - 284W​

This means that on load, the quad SLI power consumption would be only 167 Watts (41%) higher than a pair of 7800GTX 512's.

So claims of "power consumption the same as a 1kw electric fire" may be a little exaggerated. Additionally, if the 1KW PSU was 90% efficient as opposed to a 550W PSU that was only 80% efficient, the power for a system drawing 300-500 watts reduced by a further 30-50W respectively!

 

As a bit of extra info, I test ran my quad setup from my original HIPER Type R 580W supply at an ambient temp of 30C for about an hour in a 3DMark 06 loop, and it worked perfectly. I think Nvidias recommendations are a little pessimistic in order to prevent being overwhelmed with support problems due to inadequate or low quality PSUs.

 

I would have liked to see some 3dmark scores... I know they arent the be all and end all but still it would have been nice

 

i seriously hope not, and i seriously hope intel makes a graphics card that is powerfull and cool and power eficient so nvidia and AMD get the hint and do the same.

 

I want to see someone watercool one of these

 

Well, the waterblocks are already out there for them. It could be a worthwhile investment too because the default memory clocks on the GX2's tend to be throttled back more than the comparable 7900. This is mainly because of the temperature rise in the upper card due to the ventilation restriction and heat convection from the second card sandwiched just 15mm below it.

If you can draw the heat out of the core and the RAM by another method, ie water, then the percentage gains should be considerable, though from what I have read, this tends to result in a fairly minimal performance increase in quad setups.

 

I'm pretty sure they're available with water blocks from the factory. Shouldn't be too hard.

 

are these the psus that come with the nice leather case?

 

The PC Power & Cooling one doesn't, but Tagan's 900/1000W unit does.