Quad Cross-fire

[Hazirak]

Only 750W? That's actually an interesting twist to me, because 750W is the minimum for a two-way CrossFire. Logic would say that you'd need, at the very least, something upwards of a full kilowatt.

Still, I think that when people consider this on their next machine, the biggest bombshell will be the price of the cards alone. It's like looking into even a 64GB solid state drive - it's fast, it'll last you forever, but holy carp, you could buy the entire computer for as much as that one part would cost you. I seriously think that's how most people are going to look at it until the price of CrossFireX-capable cards drops.

 

[lordtron]

I am just telling you what NewEgg says, NewEgg says a 750W can power 4xPCI-E cards...
But I would not even buy a 750W, I would go for something like 1.5Kw for future use, never know what might happen.

I might even think about looking into Ram-Drives instead of an actual hdd, or even a solid state drive. Ram will always be, well so far ,will always be faster than any harddrive. Plus ram size is always going up.

 

[Hazirak]

And I'm just saying I'm pretty surprised by the number, no offense or anything was intended. I personally don't see myself going over 1Kw, but I'm also not an avid PC gamer. I am a PC gamer, but just an average one at best.

I'm actually seriously thinking about getting a small solid state drive just for my OS (maybe 8 or 16GB tops since some applications insist they be installed on the main drive), then a regular spinning drive for everything else. That way when the spinning drive reaches the end of its short life, I can just toss another drive in, format it, and be done with it instead of having to reinstall the OS and everything. If not that, then just a simple hardware RAID-1 would be my next choice.

I thought about RAM drives, but in the end, it just seemed like a way to temporarily store files. Once the power is cut for whatever reason, anything on the RAM drive is lost, and I can't think of many situations where I'd only want something to be stored temporarily.

Though now that I think about it, it could be useful for swapping files between my desktop and laptop, if you can actually share the drive out over a network. Does it actually show up as just another typical drive?

 

[lordtron]

Well with the setup that I would like to have, I would need more than 1Kw.

Oh the Ram-drives have a battery on them so that doesn't happen. I think the limit is 16hrs, then after that time then you lose your data. The Ram-Drive would show up on your computer like any other harddrive.

 

[Hazirak]

I honestly don't plan on doing more than a dual CrossFire or SLi at the most, so a single kilowatt would most likely be enough.

That's actually pretty cool though, I'll definitely have to give it some more thought.

 

[lordtron]

When I get my new system I at least want to have a Tri-Crossfire. I will need it for what I will be doing.
Gaming and Video Editing.

 

[Hazirak]

I would consider more than a dual CrossFire setup, but the hitch seems to be that in order for it to work properly, I would have to get Vista. I tried Vista and did not like it very much at all, so... I'll be happy with my two cards just so I can have XP.

 

[lordtron]

Oh Vista would be no problem for me. I have used every version of Vista thats out there. And my current computer just cant meet the video card requirements, other than that. Vista runs great.
I didn't really have any problems with Vista, except for when it first came out I had Firewire and Wireless card problems. But the newer versions don't have that problem. So its alright with me.

 

[Hazirak]

... Given, I was trying it out on a virtual machine with 512MB dedicated RAM, but still... it felt sluggish as hell, and to my surprise it said I would even need to go as far as a full gig of RAM before I could even use Aero. I've always been of the opinion that my OS shouldn't require a full gig of RAM by itself, not yet anyways. Besides, XP works absolutely fine for me, and it runs a whole lot lighter than Vista ever will, which saves my system's resources for the things I actually bought the computer for.

 

[lordtron]

Yeah. I have 1 gig of Ram on my computer and I was still unable to run Aero. But Aero is not at the top of my list. I could care less for Aero. Yeah it would be nice to have, but no thankyou.
I have also ran Vista in Virtual PC 2007 and it ran it fine. I even setup a network within my virtual pc's and Vista had no problem connecting and loading up my profile. So maybe it was something else that was slowing vista down for you, like CPU or HDD.

 

[Hazirak]

As far as the virtual machine was concerned, I'd set it up on VMware with 512MB dedicated RAM, a single processor (only have one core anyways, hyper-threading aside... all these shiny multi-core processors and I'm sitting here with my P4 3.0GHz), a 10GB hard drive (set as a pre-allocated file), and set it to run at my screen's resolution (1680x1050). System also has a 256MB GeForce 6800. Somewhat low-end by today's standards (you'd have a hard time finding some of the parts in this thing), but it still felt a decent bit sluggish compared to XP even while running Aston on top (given, that's fairly light for a shell replacement).

 

[lordtron]

Wow, thats very odd if your computer ran Vista slowly in a virtual.

My specs are lower than that.
2.7Ghz Celeron(1 CPU), 256 Ati 9250, 1GB Ram Max.

I usually run the Virtual PC's @ 256MB-512MB Ram.