Enough psu to sli?

[370forlife]

I am thinking about buying another 9800GT for my computer to sli it. Im just wondering if my psu can handle all of it. Its a 500W rosewill stallion RD-500-2SB. I have a 5000+ dual core, 4 gigs of ddr2 800 (2x2gigs,) 320gig WDC, dvd/cd-rom, Biostar Tpower N750 motherboard, and 2 80mm fans, 1 92, and 1 120mm.

[bgavin]

Re: Enough psu to sli?

www.jonnyguru.com

This guys dissects a lot of power supplies, and isn't very kind to most of them. Yours might be listed there.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Enough psu to sli?

www.hardwaresecrets.com as well

So I hear Jonnyguru retired and someone else is running the show there now.

[Fizzycapola]

Re: Enough psu to sli?

I'd rather have a single card that out performs 2 mediocre cards. Consider an 8800 Ultra (£100) OC2 or Geforce 260 / 280 GTX, swapping up the CPU to something nearly as good as you can get like an E6850 (£60) may give nearly best performance currently purchasable or within a negligable few percent of it*. (* in real world - maybe not some abstract benchmark that has no relation to reality)

If you're lucky you may find you can sell your graphics card and buy a much better one for nothing. ( i.e public assumptions that GF9 > GF8, despite 8Ultra OC [ just look at it's monsterous bandwidth 100GB+] being virtually on par with GF10)

I don't know what game you're playing, but my friends extreme budget PC, £250 - E6850 GF8800GTS (G80) been running Crysis mostly smooth (40+FPS) on high detail 1280x1024, if thats any help to you.

If you're main issue is full HD gaming, perhaps you're right to go SLI though. I see some tests where it helps in that aspect particularly.

Also not forgetting tweaking your current system and graphics card registry particulars. I have found it can make a huge difference. I managed to get an extra 200FPS whilst also increasing image quality the other day using some of my unique knowledges on graphic card registry tweaks.

[370forlife]

Re: Enough psu to sli?

I might buy 2 8800GTS's soon, my friend upgraded from those to two gtx260's.

I believe they are both 1gb Palit cards. IDK, maybe he would trade my 9800GT for those plus like 100 dollars. He was originally going to sell them to me for 200.

[Fizzycapola]

Re: Enough psu to sli?

Some important links for you:

http://service.futuremark.com/hardwa...rdsList.action

http://www.guru3d.com/category/vga_charts_crysis/

Notice how using 2 graphics cards instead of one, orindarily only achieves a few more frames per second. Particularly the difference between using 1 GTX to 2 GTX is from 51 FPS (Single card) to 60FPS (two cards in SLI)

I was going to buy some 1GB Geforce 8's myself, until I learn they come bottom of all tests, even high resolution and texture tests they always came bottom, slower than the 320Mb ones.