5870 Crossfire with overclocked system - glad that nothing blew up in my system...

[Qianglong]

I just got another Radeon HD 5870 to complement my existing ASUS 5870 for crossfire mode. My rig's PSU is a Seasonic S12 II 650W PSU and I was quite worried that it will go up in smokes after installing the second card.

So after squeezing in the second card in the cramped Antec P182 case and firing the system up, I am so surprised that everything booted up smoothly and the system was able to pass 3D Mark vantage, hours of gaming and 12 hours of furmark stress test. Mind you, my system is fairly loaded with components and overclocked as well so this goes to tell you that a high quality PSU goes a long way! Here is my system specs:

Sapphire Radeon HD5870 1GB
ASUS Radeon 5870 1GB
AMD Phenom II X4 965 OC to 3.8 Ghz
8GB DDR 2 OCZ Reaper RAM

240GB Corsair F240 SSD
128GB Corsair X128 SSD
450GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS HDD (15000 RPM)
300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 SAS HDD (15000 RPM)

Laing DDC Watercooling pump

Creative X-FI soundcard
LSI Megaraid SAS controller

 

[Sickamore]

I would say be very cautious about this move. Running all of that hardware on a low power supply can damage your equipment. It doesn't necessarily have to be your graphics card. Your motherboard can get damage etc. The right amount of power has to go through the hardware so that it can perform at optimum level. So bear in mind about this things.

 

[RaistlinZ]

What kind of performance increase have you gotten since setting up the XFire? Do you have any benchies you can show us? My single 5870 is feeling pretty lonely.

 

[MagickMan]

I would say be very cautious about this move. Running all of that hardware on a low power supply can damage your equipment. It doesn't necessarily have to be your graphics card. Your motherboard can get damage etc. The right amount of power has to go through the hardware so that it can perform at optimum level. So bear in mind about this things.

Pfftttt, I run something very similar with a Corsair HX650 and it's been great, he should be fine. I'll bet he's only pulling 500-550W at full load.

 

[happy medium]

I would say be very cautious about this move. Running all of that hardware on a low power supply can damage your equipment. It doesn't necessarily have to be your graphics card. Your motherboard can get damage etc. The right amount of power has to go through the hardware so that it can perform at optimum level. So bear in mind about this things.

I agree, A normal system with a small overclock and 1 harddrive might be ok,but with 4 drives (2 15,000 rpm power hogs ) a overclocked cpu, 8gb ram, audio card, and controller card, I'd be carefull.

Better safe then REAL sorry.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Considering how expensive the rest of the equipment was, I would suggest upgrading to a quality 850W power supply.

 

[faxon]

yea that is kinda pushing it. i have benched that type of a setup under occt PSU tester and it can actually hit upwards of 700w np with OCed cards and CPU and 4 drives, water cooled. wont ever hit that load under gaming, but its similar stress testing it like that vs running it 24/7 under distributed computing. even with a 24 hour occt PSU test run sometimes my system still crashes when just running DC @ 75% cpu load 100% gpu load (about 500w draw), cause i leave it running like that for weeks on end without reboots. thats on a 1050w psu as well, so its definitely not PSU related here lol. i just had to readjust my OC again last week, think my board is probably wearing out. as noted above, i would recommend a quality 850w PSU as well lol

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151083

great deal

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Pick up a wattage reader from Home depot or Lowes for 20$ and see how much it's pulling. Guaranteed it's not 100% accurate but atleast you can get a good idea.

EDIT: I'll do a quick test on my 3rd Rig running Furmark... one sec. CLICK THUMBNAILS FOR LARGER PICS

RIG 3 running Furmark:


RIG 3 idle: