The Pomegranate Me thread
 

Someone talk me out of spending $300 on getting another GTX 580 and a better power supply.

It's not $300, it's $300 + $200 per year for as long as you keep the card.

And in hot summers the system will sometimes hang with two GPUs when it would have kept on trucking with one.

$300 would look much better in your savings account and someone else would be thrilled to find your factors.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;381606]Someone talk me out of spending $300 on getting another GTX 580 and a better power supply.[/QUOTE]You should not be spending all that money. Some of it should be reclaimed by selling-on the old PSU.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;381606]Someone talk me out of spending $300 on getting another GTX 580 and a better power supply.[/QUOTE]

If you are going to run two 580s, make that supply at least a 1050 W, better still a 1200 W. What are you running now?

Sorry. I am no help with your request regarding temperance.

I'm not seeing more than 600W at the plug for i7/4930K and two GTX580s; I'm using a 1kW modular PSU ([url]http://www.scan.co.uk/search.aspx?q=RSA00-AFBAG1[/url]), and monitoring power with a Kill-A-Watt-equivalent plug-through widget from Maplin.

xilman was unable to get the same GTX580 card that I'm using (literally the same one - I bought a pair, then thought two was excessive and tried to sell him one) to work with the PSU he had; on the other hand I think that PSU exploded a few months later.

[QUOTE=fivemack;381638]xilman was unable to get the same GTX580 card that I'm using (literally the same one - I bought a pair, then thought two was excessive and tried to sell him one) to work with the PSU he had; on the other hand I think that PSU exploded a few months later.[/QUOTE]The PSUs of both systems in which I tried the 580 are still working just fine. Each PSU should be capable of powering the card with ease and I've still no idea why it didn't work in either system. Very odd.

Perhaps there are BIOS inadequacies in my boxes, though that proposal is very much clutching at straws. It's consistent with my now vague memories that the 580 wasn't recognized and/or initialized by the BIOS in at least one system.


Paul

In the system I'd consider adding the second GTX 580, has a Haswell 4770 with three cores used for mprime, on-board Intel for driving the display, and a GTX 580 and a GT 430 used solely for trial factoring. It's got a [url=http://www.corsair.com/en/cx-series-cx500m-modular-atx-power-supply-500-watt-80-plus-bronze-certified-modular-psu]Corsair CX500m[/url] 500 watt power supply that's drawing 465 watts at the wall as measured by a Kill-o-watt (assuming 83% efficiency, it's supplying 385 watts) . When I added the GTX 580 doing TF it added about 250 watts of at-the-wall consumption (50 watts when doing nothing). I figure a 750 watt power supply would handle the second GTX 580 fine, and fivemack's measurements would seem to confirm that.

[QUOTE=fivemack;381638]I'm not seeing more than 600W at the plug for i7/4930K and two GTX580s; I'm using a 1kW modular PSU ([URL]http://www.scan.co.uk/search.aspx?q=RSA00-AFBAG1[/URL]), and monitoring power with a Kill-A-Watt-equivalent plug-through widget from Maplin.

xilman was unable to get the same GTX580 card that I'm using (literally the same one - I bought a pair, then thought two was excessive and tried to sell him one) to work with the PSU he had; on the other hand I think that PSU exploded a few months later.[/QUOTE]

I have to acknowledge that my comment above is based on an AMD FX-8350 system. It may also relate to a suspect OCZ 1 KW PSU. I was having stability issues when there was a 580 and a 570 in the system.

The Kill a Watt says that it is drawing 550 W with a single 580. It reads 365 W with the GPU at idle.

Well.... I ended up spending $240 :banana:

I got a Corsair CX750m power supply on sale, and it's now drawing 760 watts from the wall running two GTX 580's and a 4770 (so internal draw is about 640 watts, about 85% of capacity). I'm going to need more air into and through the case though.

760 Watts for a CPU and two GTX 580's? Wow.