500 watt PSU enough for 2 x ATI 1950's?

[clarkey01]

Is it enough or would you say 600 watt PSU is needed?

Thanks guys

 

[deamer44]

Personally I would go with a good quality 600 watt power supply

 

[thilanliyan]

Do you have to go with x1950s? There's much better, cheap cards out there right now.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Well Wattage is almost meaningless, sadly.
What you need to decide is this :
a) Does the PSU have enough PCIE 6-pin power connections to work?
b) Does the PSU have enough theoretical +12V rail amps for the PCIE connectors, motherboard, and so on?
c) Is the PSU high quality and reliable at delivering 90% of its rated output over long term use? Some "500W" supplies blow up if you ask them to deliver 300W, so there's a big difference between quality engineered supplies and bad ones.

The answer is that you'll almost certainly have a whole-system WATTAGE of under 450W, probably even under 330W for the whole system under GPU / CPU load.

A good quality 500W PSU with 24 pin M/B power (assuming you have that), a 4 pin M/B aux. power output, two 6-pin PCIE power connectors, and plenty of continuous amps on +12V should work fine. A lot of low quality 500W PSUs would NOT work fine, though, since they'd lack enough +12V amps or good stability or good cooling or whatever even though your actual power needs are maybe 450W or less.

Thus to be "on the safe side" a good quality 520, 600, 620, 650 PSU might be more likely to work. The real factor isn't the wattage, it is the quality of the supply and ensuring that you're asking maybe 70% of what it can (in marketing speak) actually deliver just because you may not be able to trust it to give 80%, 90%, 100%.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'd go with a 600W or perhaps a 650W (EA650) instead. I bought two EA650s, to use with my quad-core overclocked rigs with dual 4850s.

 

[clarkey01]

Originally posted by: thilan29
Do you have to go with x1950s? There's much better, cheap cards out there right now.

Its not for me a friend is having issues and my firs guess was that he didn't have a big enough pwersupply, with one card in everything works fine, with a second he gets a blank screen and sometimes it will just restart.

 

[Zap]

I know someone running dual 1950 (or maybe 1900) in Crossfire with a PCP&C Siliencer 500. It runs fine, but he's definately running maxed out because he likes to run a lot of HDDs and can never add the last one because system will shut down under load.

 

[Elfear]

I measured the power draw from the wallplate at ~530W (440W from the components) with the following rig:

Oced X1950XTs in CF
Oced E6600
1 Hdd
Lots of fans

I would be a little leary of using a 500W PSU with X1950XTs in CF. What PSU does your buddy have?