PSU? GSU? GPU? BFD?

[Guest]

Lets say money isnt an issue, what is the best way for me to power my brand new ASUS ARES/2DIS/4GD5 Radeon HD 5870 X2? I have a brand new SILVERSTONE ST1500 and its good for 4x 6+2's & 4x 6's but from what Im reading Im going to need 4 more 6+2's to do the 4 way crossfire shtuff with max voltage (whew). FYI... I have been working on PCs for almost 15 years now but to be honest, Im as multiple video card stupid as it gets

Any help and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated. (ok comments are ok as well)

 

[hunter315]

You can only run 2 ARES in crossfire since they each have 2 GPUs on board, and with two of them you hit the 4 GPU limit, thats the max that the drivers can support, so while you may be able to fit 4 on a board, software wont allow you do so you actually have plenty of power in your ST1500 for quadfire since you only have to power 2 ARES cards.

 

[Guest]

Great info! I guess Ill have to put the other 2 in a system for my 13 year old. Will two of these in crossfire run as fast as 4 NVidia's in SLI? Should I send em back and get these instead? ZOTAC AMP! ZT-40102-10P GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi)

 

[hunter315]

4 GTX 480s will run a bit faster, but also quite a bit hotter, they each run at about 250W, the ARES each pull about 350W so its a lot more power consumption and heat with 4 GTX 480s, especially if you start OCing them. The two ARES should be able to max out most things.

 

[Guest]

I really appreciate the info and I hope I can return the favor someday.

Thanks

 

[Timop]

Actually not quite, the Dual Ares has a slight edge in most games. Tri-fire scaling is actually better than 3-way SLI.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Actually not quite, the Dual Ares has a slight edge in most games. Tri-fire scaling is actually better than 3-way SLI.

Wouldn't that technically be Quad-Fire though? [:mousemonkey]

 

[hunter315]

Really? I know that dual GTX 480s beats dual 5870s in just about everything, even though scaling drops dramatically for the third and fourth i would have expected quad 480s to beat quad 5870s, but if ATI managed to pull out better tri-fire and quadfire scaling i guess the 5870s would take the lead.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Really? I know that dual GTX 480s beats dual 5870s in just about everything, even though scaling drops dramatically for the third and fourth i would have expected quad 480s to beat quad 5870s, but if ATI managed to pull out better tri-fire and quadfire scaling i guess the 5870s would take the lead.

Guru 3D did an article way back in may to try and find out but ran into "issues".

Now before we start with the conclusion and everybody starts yelling oooy Hilbert, where are the 3-way CrossfireX results, here's the thing: I have three R5870 and three R5850 cards arranged especially for this article series to compare to. Now, we always say it ... the more GPUs you add, the more problems you can run into. Make no mistake, that rule applies to both ATI and NVIDIA. Unfortunately things for ATI became problematic. Our test system worked perfectly fine in 2-way ATI CrossfireX mode, but adding a third card would just not frickin work. It's an odd bug that we have encountered numerous times in the past already. Though the driver installation works fine and the (in this case 5850) products are recognized fine somehow ATI Catalyst decides to disable the 3rd adapter. Intriguing, puzzling, irritating yes .. but non-solvable with the limited time at hand for this article.

Source.

 

[Timop]

Wouldn't that technically be Quad-Fire though? [:mousemonkey]

Well, I meant tri-fire and beyond.
Quadfire/4-way always proved to be no more than a 10% increase in performance for 95% of games.