Will an 850 do it for high-end SLI?

[Assoul]

Hello,


I'm looking at building the following:

AMD 8350
4 x 8GB DDR3
2 x nVidia GTX 480
4 x SSD; 4 x HD in two RAID 10 configurations
PCI-e RAID card

I am trying to use the following power supply, but don't know if I should go with something better:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KYK1CC6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s01

I'm not necessarily going to be gaming full time, but I would like that option. I'm mostly getting two cards to accommodate 4 screens since I do remote support. I would, however, like to play the occasional game and have it looking good, such as BeamNG Drive, Fallout 4 and Duke Nukem 3D :thumbsup:

Thanks for your feedback.

 

[fralexandr]

the EVGA 850W B2 should be a good unit
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story4&reid=393

It'd be possible, since the PSU would be drawing close to 850w at the wall, which would put it at 722W output from the PSU, but with the extra HDDs & SSDs (add up to 40-60w) and the AMD CPU, if you plan on overclocking it'd be a bad idea.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/19

It'd probably be a good idea to replace the 480 with something newer, perhaps when the new 14/16nm gpus hit later this year. The idle as well as load consumption on those old cards is pretty wasteful. The 480's are getting long in the tooth, and newer SLI/CF setups would be fine on the 850w with reasonable overclocks.

 

[Assoul]

It'd be possible, since the PSU would be drawing close to 850w at the wall, which would put it at 722W output from the PSU, but with the extra HDDs (add up to 40W) and the AMD CPU, if you plan on overclocking it'd be a bad idea.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/19

It'd probably be a good idea to replace the 480 with something newer, perhaps when the new 14/16nm gpus hit later this year. The idle as well as load consumption on those old cards is pretty wasteful. And the 480's are getting long in the tooth.

Thanks for the input. I'm actually going with a different PSU all together: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00COIZTZM.

The reason I'm going with two 480s is because they scored very high on videocardbenchmark.net (4,338 passmarks). Higher-end video cards, which scored double that (ie, GTX 970) cost over $350, while I might get two 480s for less than half of that cost total. I know that they won't perform exactly the same but I'm doing this more so for quad monitor support.

 

[lehtv]

I know that they won't perform exactly the same but I'm doing this more so for quad monitor support.

You don't need to run SLI for connecting monitors to two GPUs. You could run 970 or similar performing card (used R9 290 would be excellent), and some low end GPU for secondary monitors.

 

[Assoul]

You don't need to run SLI for connecting monitors to two GPUs. You could run 970 or similar performing card (used R9 290 would be excellent), and some low end GPU for secondary monitors.

What if I want monitor spanning during a game- like Eyefinity?

 

[MrTeal]

Regardless of the passmark score, a 4GB 960 or R9 380 would be a faster GPU than 480SLI even when SLI is working right. The only benefit to dual 480 would be if you're doing compute.
Something like this 4GB 380 or this GTX 960 would work well for your application.

The only real disadvantage to the single card is that you'll probably need adapters from the ports to the monitors if they don't support the needed standards.