Duel power supplies or single higher watt?

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TechJeff

Limp Gawd
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Mar 25, 2009
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I was wondering if I should go with duel PSUs or a single high watt unit? My build needs at least 1200 now and I could use a 1500 watt in the future. What some people are doing is using two power supplies, such as the Corsair 1200i and splitting the load between the two for better efficiency. However, if that dosn't really matter, then would a single 1500 watt PSU like the eVGA 1500 Supernova be better despite not splitting the load?

Also, I was wondering for those with 2 high watt PSUs if that means 2400 watt output? If so, that would not work with my UPS and I would need a higher model to handle that type of power. That is also why I was considering a single 1500 watt model.

Thanks for any input if you have done this.
 
What exactly are you powering that requires that much power?

Single PSU is generally better from a simplicity and management point of view. In terms of electrical power supplied, that depends on the quality of the PSUs chosen.

Power drawn from the wall is higher than power supplied. Figuring typical ~90% efficiency for Platinum PSUs, 1500 watts drawn from the power supply is 1666 watts from the wall. Power drawn also depends on the load level your computer is at. Just because you have 2400 watts capacity doesn't mean its supplying 2400 watts all the time.
 
How do you need 1500watts?

I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but in this thread you did not even know how to tell which direction a fan blows its air, which is pretty rudimentary stuff for anyone who has ever done any type of PC assembly/repair. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1719778

Again, not trying to be rude just possibly trying to save you some cash monies/headaches.
 
leeleatherwood said:
How do you need 1500watts?

I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but in this thread you did not even know how to tell which direction a fan blows its air, which is pretty rudimentary stuff for anyone who has ever done any type of PC assembly/repair. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1719778

Again, not trying to be rude just possibly trying to save you some cash monies/headaches.
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I have built many custom PC systems, but this is my first very high-end water cooled system. The direction of the fans was because some do NOT have any indicators on them. I could've done the paper test, held in front of the fan to see which direction, but thought others that have done more water cooling and such could help better.

The reason for the high power PSU is because I have about $8,000 in parts for a high-end workstation:

300 TDP - 2 E5 Xeon 2687w CPUs

130 TDP - Asus motherboard

600 TDP - 2 eVGA 680 GTX FTW+ in SLI (custom overclocked hence the increased TDP from about 275 each)

duel swiftech 655 pumps

12 120mm fans

plus hard drives, SSD, Blu-Ray burner, lampton fan controllers, hot swap bay, etc.
 
I water cooled my whole PC and have a 1500 watt power supply. 2 gtx 480s on load drains about 1100 watt. I would go for 1500 watt power supply.
 
Okay, you legitimately actually have a high power draw system. That said, I doubt that the Asus board actually pulls 130 watts, and the two 680s combined, even when overclocked, would pull somewhere in the 500w range.

A 1200 watt power supply should be perfect for that system. If you want room for tri/quad-SLI, go ahead and step up to the 1500 watt, which should still be enough. You have to make sure the circuits and wires in the house can actually handle that kind of load though.

Computer fans all blow in one direction. All computer fans have the supports for the motor on the exhaust side, there's no need for indicators for anyone who's been working with computers a decent amount of time.
 
Tsumi said:
Okay, you legitimately actually have a high power draw system. That said, I doubt that the Asus board actually pulls 130 watts, and the two 680s combined, even when overclocked, would pull somewhere in the 500w range.

A 1200 watt power supply should be perfect for that system. If you want room for tri/quad-SLI, go ahead and step up to the 1500 watt, which should still be enough. You have to make sure the circuits and wires in the house can actually handle that kind of load though.

Computer fans all blow in one direction. All computer fans have the supports for the motor on the exhaust side, there's no need for indicators for anyone who's been working with computers a decent amount of time.
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Thanks for the replies.

Just an FYI, the eVGA 680 FTW+ draws 275TDP according to the web site that lists video card models and TDP ratings. It says that if you push them they can draw up to 350 TDP in their tests. I don't plan to push them much, I got some of the specs off another site and it says with them in use they are 300 TDP or slightly overclocked even more than the FTW+ already are from the factory.

I just didn't know about fan terms or what they mean really. Hence the questions about them. When you say "have supports on the exhaust side", I got some great pictures in the other thread that helped and I assume you mean the side without the company logo in the middle of the fan blade (as most have). I'm pretty clear on this now, just never done much fans as the smaller cases that were just for family use typically had them mounted already. :)

In regard to the house wiring, yes, I have taken care of that. About 10 years ago I had all outlets done to 20amp specs with 12AWG electrical wire by a professional electrician. Also, I plan to have more work done and install 3 outlets in my home office, all dedicated isolated grounds and 30amp with 230VAC current running to dedicated circuits.:D
 
I doubt your 680s are going to pull that much. 680s pull in the neighborhood of 250w at full bore. It's very difficult to make them go higher then that. You might have been looking at full system load numbers, not just GPU wattage.

The 1200w should be just dandy for you.You should be hanging around the 1000-1050w mark at full bore. That's a healthy amount of headroom.
 
^Even for 250W you need some serious overvolting (which as we all know is a hard thing to achieve on Kepler ;)), 680s are 200W cards, maybe 220W for high OC samples. :)

@ OP, what you have there is a ~800W system in synthetics, with locked processors, you could comfortably run it on a decent <1KW PSU.
 
TechJeff said:
Thanks for the replies.

Just an FYI, the eVGA 680 FTW+ draws 275TDP according to the web site that lists video card models and TDP ratings. It says that if you push them they can draw up to 350 TDP in their tests. I don't plan to push them much, I got some of the specs off another site and it says with them in use they are 300 TDP or slightly overclocked even more than the FTW+ already are from the factory.

I just didn't know about fan terms or what they mean really. Hence the questions about them. When you say "have supports on the exhaust side", I got some great pictures in the other thread that helped and I assume you mean the side without the company logo in the middle of the fan blade (as most have). I'm pretty clear on this now, just never done much fans as the smaller cases that were just for family use typically had them mounted already. :)

In regard to the house wiring, yes, I have taken care of that. About 10 years ago I had all outlets done to 20amp specs with 12AWG electrical wire by a professional electrician. Also, I plan to have more work done and install 3 outlets in my home office, all dedicated isolated grounds and 30amp with 230VAC current running to dedicated circuits.:D
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This site says 173 watts for the Classified version. This site says 220 watts max in a synthetic benchmark (furmark), and typical gaming less than 200 watts for a DirectCUII card.

Power consumption does not increase much with higher clock speed. It's the overvolting that really increases power consumption, and the GTX 680 cannot really overvolt.
 
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