3 way crossfire on 780 watt psu?

[mythrandyr]

Hi fellas,

i was wondering if it would be possible to go for 3 way crossfire using 3 of these cards

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-216-SP

on a 780 watt OCZ Modular PSU without frying my components? or if it would be a safer bet to buy a new psu?

also while i am here, is it better to go for 16X/8X/8X or stick with 16X/16X?

the reason why i ask is because i already have 2 of those cards in crossfire but am considering buying a 3rd.

thanks,


Myth.

 

[clone]

I would get a 1000watt psu if you want to run 3 cards,i run 2 on a corsair HX 850 but i think it would be to much for mine.

 

[Happy]

You could run those on any decent 500W they only use 108W max each, so if you what a bit of breathing space just get a 600W PSU

 

[RJC]

The psu will handle 3 fine, my setup with crossfire 5850 and i7 @ 4ghz pulls 480w with Prime and vantage running.

 

[mythrandyr]

thanks for the reply fellas. I was just asking cos like i originally said i am thinking of going for 3X crossfire and if i do it will be the 1st time for that. Thr only question is now, will it be worth it?

 

[Ghengis]

I don't think Xfire scales well into the third card - If you can afford it you may be better selling and spending a little more on a pair of 5850s and Xfiring them. They OC very well and will give a pair of 5870s a run for their (actually your) money.

2x 5850s would be fine on a 680w PSU.

 

[rolypolyman]

I don't think Xfire scales well into the third card - If you can afford it you may be better selling and spending a little more on a pair of 5850s and Xfiring them. They OC very well and will give a pair of 5870s a run for their (actually your) money.

2x 5850s would be fine on a 680w PSU.

+1

 

[garsands]

I don't think Xfire scales well into the third card - If you can afford it you may be better selling and spending a little more on a pair of 5850s and Xfiring them. They OC very well and will give a pair of 5870s a run for their (actually your) money.

2x 5850s would be fine on a 680w PSU.

+2

I have 3x5770 & it's very hit & miss they work very well with some games but not aswell with others.
I bought the 3 just for the fun as I wanted the look of 3 cards in a row.
Will be replacing them in a few months time for a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X.
Prob make a £80 loss but it's all fun.
So if you want to do it for the fun & looks of 3 cards in a row then buy a 3rd.

 

[mythrandyr]

well thats the issue i'm having garsands. I don't want to inadvertantly decrease the systems performance. I was playing bioshock 2 the other night and appart from it crashing on the AMD quad cores, making me edit the msconfig file so that the system boots using only 2 core, it played immaculately.

I'm not sure at the minute that upgrading to one card in the 5870 series would yield too much of a benefit either tbh. Considering the price to performance ratio i think that i would, for the time being, be better off keeping these graphics cards until the price comes down on the 5900 series and then upgrading.

Other than that the only other thing i am going to upgrade is the processor to one of the Thuban hex cores when they come out later this year. Hopefully they will have near enough the same capabilities as the I7 and provide much better support for multi core games as the quad cores at the minute crash when i try and play multi core games like bio shock 2 and dragon age origins and the only way round that is to set the pc to use only 2 cores through msconfig or through setting cpu affinity which gets old having to do that every time you start a game.