PSU enough or not?

[chrislandry238]

Hey Linus, i enjoy your videos as they keep me up to date with the lastest hardware. I was wondering if you could give me a recommendation my current pc is as follows Asus X58 Rampage III formula, Corsair Dominator gt 12GB (3x 4gb) Corsair h70 water cooling for CPU, Intel 960 i7 3.2 ghz (OC to 3.6 ghz), LG Blu-ray burner, Ultra X4 1050w psu, 1 sata 3 1gb WD hd, 1 sata 2 750 gb hitachi hd, 1 SSD OCZ Agility 3 Sata 3 120gb hd, Coolermaster Haf X case, 2 XFX 6970's in crossfire mode :

My question I might get a third 6970 to do trifire and I'm wondering is my PSU more than enough or not (ps I'm not interested in OC the 6970's if that is possible)

Also I'm using a LG 47 inch HDTV (60hz) (with trumotion 120hz) 1080p as my monitor.

Another quick question will trifire 6970's make any difference? Will I notice any difference or is it a waste of money?

Cheers
Chris

[GT7R]

It's close but will do just fine.

[Apathetik]

Trifire with those won't be a ton of extra difference, or higher frame rate. If you're only on 1 monitor too, then I would definitely say no.

[Bond007]

Tri fire is more powerful, but you get a smaller gain than going from one to 2 (lower scaling). A quality 1050w PSU would be more than enough, but I am not sure how good the high wattage ultra PSU are. Those two points along with the fact that you are only gaming at 1080p and my recommendation is to stay with the 2 x hd 6970. I don't think its worth the extra cost.

[Dragonstongue]

Well, Ultra is not a high end maker of power supplies, some of them were simply awesome units, and some, well they simply were dangerous to load anywhere close to it "ratings"

dual 6970 can happily feed 2560x1440 resolution, gaming, in most games the Radeons do not scale well past the 2nd card for anything but the dual X2 style cards(quad fire) or the 7900 series, its really not worth the added cost, heat, power consumption as alot of games show very little playable difference.

on a 60Hz monitor, if you got say 1000FPS it wouldnt do any better then it running 100FPS, so, unless the games or watever that you are using are tapping out of what the 6970s can give you(I doubt) there is no direct reason for tri-fire of them. Now if you were bitcoin mining, folding, ripping movies and such that can use the extra gpu, that would be different.

Save up the coin, and go for dual 7950s if you want the extra performance

[Adzsask]

a 3rd 6970 would only make sense if you ran 3 monitors while gaming. Ultra is a shady brand I would never use one, one might last 10 years, while the next one could last a few hours and take out 1/2 your rig's components. Really there is no need for any more then CF 6970's for one monitor, my best buddy ran CF 6970's on his T.V. for the last year, and now moved to a GTX 590, and really the only difference is way less noise/heat from the graphics, and synthetic benchmark scores, gaming is the same and better with phys x and heavy tessellation games, he is very happy with it and is one of those people who won't play a game unless he can max the eye candy.

[Linus]

I'm not much of a 3-way graphics card configuration advocate...

Good point there Linus,neither games benefit from it that much,Dual 6970 are well overkill for any game u wanna run at any single or triple monitor resolution u wanna run at!
Linus himself (Yeah YEAH) could run HAWX2 on 5 (FIIIIIIVE) 1080P monitor in a crazy resolution with crazy constant 60FPS!
He has a good point there,actually!

[486]

1000W Seasonic won't even work hard.
Each of your GPUs can consume no more than 225W, 675W in total. CPU - max 150W, 50-60W for the rest. Even Seasonic 850W will be ok.
Ultra - I do not know. Unproven brand.