Tri SLi's On All The Time

Digitalcaveman

Digitalcaveman

Gawd
Joined
Dec 18, 2006
Messages
602
Guys,

I have a question regarding leaving my system on all the time. It's water cooled and as you can see in my sig, it's pretty bad a$$ but regarding my Tri SLi setup do you think it would be fine if I left it on all the time or will it suck a ton of juice etc? I have a need to remote into it from the road and am wondering if it would matter much if I left it on all the time or would it be better if I left it off? Appreciate any advice.

Also, second question - Triple 480's compared to whats new out there now, anyone seeing any major differences in game performance?

Thx,

DC
 
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I think that would pull a lot of juice, but 3 of any high performance cards do that. Less so with AMD cards, but I don't think you would save enough electric to warrant the upgrade. 3x 580s would be faster, but do you need any more speed?

3x480s are monsterous!
 
I used to leave mine on all the time, but transferred all my media files to my seed box to avoid having to keep my main rig on..

Looks like we have a similar setup...also it kept my office from being a 100 degrees lol
 
No, I think from what I've read and heard that I should be good for awhile with the 480's. Just wanted some feedback on maybe if any of the new games will take advantage of technology in the 580's that are not in the 480's something specific would probably interest me. But if just negligible performance gain, nah..not worth upgrading. Plus I'd have to rip apart my system buy new water blocks...lol...um no... had 1 gpu fail when I built this system took 1 month to take it out, reassemble, send back, get new one, re install....it's a lot tough with WC system so before any upgrades happen the performance would have to be major in my honest opinion to warrant it.
 
Digitalcaveman said:
Guys,

I have a question regarding leaving my system on all the time. It's water cooled and as you can see in my sig, it's pretty bad a$$ but regarding my Tri SLi setup do you think it would be fine if I left it on all the time or will it suck a ton of juice etc? I have a need to remote into it from the road and am wondering if it would matter much if I left it on all the time or would it be better if I left it off? Appreciate any advice.

Also, second question - Triple 480's compared to whats new out there now, anyone seeing any major differences in game performance?

Thx,

DC
Click to expand...

Whether SLI is on or off makes no difference. The cards will basically downclock and idle while not playing games. It's fine. As for the performance, the GTX 480 is basically the same as the GTX 570. Yes the GTX 580's are slightly faster, but not by enough to justify replacing three GTX 480's with three GTX 580's. Especially not so late in the product cycle.
 
Thanks Dan D, that's what I figured and since I water cool all I need to do is leave the rig on and turn my 3 monitors off and there won't be any type of heat issue. Also, thanks for the performance advice, I figured as much as well and glad to have others agree with me.
 
GTX 480s pull about 50 watts when idle. So leaving your computer on all the time isn't going to send your power bill through the roof. Your fine with 3 x GTX 480s, That should hold you over until Kepler or AMD 7000 series and then some, however I only skip one generation of GPU's max to sell things for highest value possible. If you wait more than that your cards will devalue drastically. By the time Kepler and 7900 series come out you would have had gotten your fun and money's worth from the 480s.
 
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