SLI Certified? Crossfire Certified? Does it matter?

[therapy]

Browsing Newegg I just noticed that a lot of the power supplies are SLI certified for nVidia's SLI thing. Almost none of them are Crossfire certified, though. Which is more important? Would you buy a power supply for your rig that was Crossfire certified if you were going to use SLI? Or would require one that was SLI certified? Vice versa?

I guess I'm just curious as to how people think about this stuff. I know a lot of people with SLI systems that had to upgrade their power supplies, I guess I wonder how the choose which PSU to go with.

Please answer the poll.

 

[[Spectre]]

They are marketing gimmicks....though the crossfire gimmick may be a littel more stringent.

 

[jonnyGURU]

SLI certification is nothing more than a catalog of specs and a load test.

They've moved the requirements around to accomodate different power supplies and they don't differentiate better power supplies for higher end video cards. According to the nVidia website, an Antec NeoHE 500W is just as good as a PCP&C 1kW.

The Crossfire certification is rather hardcore and brings even decent PSU's to their knees:

Test System Configuration

Details:

Motherboard Mfg
	ECS

Motherboard Name
	RD480-A939

Northbridge chipset
	RD480

Southbridge chipset
	SB450

SATA Devices
	2 x Western Digital 10k RPM 34 GB HD in RAID 0

IDE Devices
	1 x LG DVD-ROM

Processor
	AMD Athlon FX-57

Memory Configuration
	Corsair PC3200 2 x 256MB

Crossfire Edition model
	Radeon X1800 XT Crossfire Edition

Crossfire Ready model
	Radeon X1800 XT

They run loops that puts the GPU's up to 100% load. Naturally, this is going to put some serious taxation on the CPU and RAM in the process. If a PSU fails, they'll switch out video cards and continue until is passes.

 

[Bbq]

Doesn't SLI certified mean who can pay nvidia the most?

 

[DaCoOlNeSs]

Crossfire cert is important to me, because that means that it will handle a dual X2800XTX load when I get them I hope. I try my best to get a good one anyway

 

[texuspete00]

People reported issues with Crossfire and my OCZ 600w, so I used and voted for Crossfire cert is important to me. There are only like 5 psus on there for use with the Radeon x1900. I put the list to good use. Sparkle 650w was $91 and a brand I trusted. Only skimpy on style and connectors. Crossfire certified enabled me to pull the trigger very easily. On an issue I was already worried about pretty bad.