Mod for a dual PSU corsair 540

Avenged7Fold · 25 Oct 2013 at 00:37

I love the Corsair 540 and am wondering what to do if i ever decide to crossfire. I bench and overclock to the limits my watercooling can take me, so power consumption can be quite high at time. Rather than buying a new high watt power supply, i would rather just add another, since it is cheaper and very useful for me to have an extra PSU since i run 3 different systems, if one fails i wouldn't be lacking on a spare supply.

I was thinking of modding the case so that i can fit a PSU directly above where the current supply is and cutting an exhaust for the PSU in the back panel. I am also playing with the idea of modding the back panel to mount a 240mm radiator on it too.

Sounds easy enough in my head, anyone done something similar to their case or to the 540 specifically and ran into any unexpected troubles?

Make · 25 Oct 2013 at 08:04

I'd say you will have trouble firing up both PSU's at the same time, otherwise you'll be running into weird issues such as a 2nd GPU appearing a few secs after starting up etc..

For convenience and less heat etc. I'd just slap in a proper PSU.

Bart_Hunt · 25 Oct 2013 at 10:28

I am not sure about that, but can you run mobo/cpu/cooling/HDDs/DVD on one PSU and graphics on another one?
I know there are some nice low profile PSUs around.
FSP Group makes a 300W model that would fit into 540 easily, its cheap and can run Haswell CPUs. Model name: FSP FSP250-60GHT(85) PSU.
Any other are quite expensive so I'd say, buy a bigger PSU.

Avenged7Fold · 25 Oct 2013 at 16:14

People have used multiple PSUs to power multi GPU set ups for a while, dont think it will be much of a problem.

If i decide to Crossfire, i would need a single PSU able to handle a heavily overclocked fx 8 core and two 290x's. The minimum recommended PSU for a single 290x system is 750Watts. Throw in another 290x and include the extra power of heavy overclocking and any single PSU that could handle that will cost me a huge chunk of my 290x money.