4-way SLI Heat & Power Consumption 4x GTX 480 Classified Silverstone 1500W One Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
841 words · ~4 min read
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now this is meant as a followup to my uh setup video for the four-way SLI here
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and I just wanted to address some of the naysayers in my comments who are telling
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me Oh no 1500 watts is not nearly enough
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for four-way SLI every card consumes 400
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watts or something along those lines to which I say not true um actually this
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power supply The Strider 1500 watt is more than adequate to power the system
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and uh to demonstrate that I will just
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you rather than tell you about it so first of all why don't we have a look at
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our GPU idle temperatures which you can see are in the uh 60 60° or so range and
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the system actually isn't even that loud right now now I don't have the video
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cards overclocked or anything crazy like that at the moment however you know
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that's something that I may play around with in the future I also had a couple
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people ask me to download the latest driver which I have done and so you can
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see that the only outputs that I can use are these ones and these ones so card
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one and card three I don't know if 3D
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Vision surround is available yet in fact I I'm pretty sure it's not till the next
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driver release but you uh you will be
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able to run 3D Vision surround with three monitors hooked up to the two
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cards in the future so I'm running maximum 3D performance and I am not
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dedicating any particular GPU to the
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physics in fact why don't we just set the CPU to oh whatever forget it okay
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we'll just leave it how it was cancel anyway so let's run 3D Mark Vantage and
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have a look at just how much power
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consumption we're going to be looking at with a system like this I should also
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mention the CPU is overclocked to 4
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GHz so the uh the well the video cards
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are going to be as not bottlenecked as is possible with a rig like this it is
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still on the loading screen actually this might take a little while cuz uh 3D
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Mark Vantage takes forever to load but we're consuming about 700 Watts at the
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wall right now now here's something I should explain when you're consuming 700
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Watts at the wall that does not mean you need a 700 wat power supply that means a
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700 W power supply would be kind of borderline but it would definitely work
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because power supplies are rated for how much DC wattage they can output whereas
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this measurement is how much AC wattage is going in so a power supply That's
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rated for 1,000 wats DC at uh 80 plus so
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let's say it's 80% efficiency would actually be able to supply a system
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that's drawing up to about uh 1150 1200
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watts from the wall so this is only
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about a 500 watt power supply that could be running oh there we go 3D kicked in
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we're over 1,000 Watts now so that means
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that actually we could run this system like like borderline borderline run this
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system on probably an 850 900 wat power supply now I've actually seen it I've
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run this benchmark Mark already and I've seen it Peak up to 1100 Watts but this
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should pretty much address everyone who's telling me that the 1500 wat power
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supply is not enough because the 1500 wat power supply is probably actually
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operating at Peak efficiency right now with a system that draws about 800 watts
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1500 wat power supply is looking at about 60% load so thank you for checking
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out my video today on the power consumption and heat of four-way SLI in
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fact wait wait there's more uh don't go away yet because let's have a look at
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what the load temps are going to be on these video cards when we're actually
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running a 3D application so this isn't going to be quite a worst case scenario
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because the air is quite cool here and we've only been running the game for a
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little while so it would probably take another uh 5 minutes or so to actually
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get a proper load temperature but it'll be pretty close uh what do we got here
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wow so they go up to actually these were still Rising so it's very hard to say
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what they'd peek at but maybe I'll do a separate video on that but it looks like
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they went up as high as 85° on my top
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GPU and that's the hottest one by a long shot oh well by one degree anyway so
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there thanks for checking out my video on the four-way SLI
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rig