PSU for (eventual) 2x 470's, and 1 240

[johnb4467]

Hi everyone,

I am "growing" out of my mini-itx case (shame, loved the thing!) for Octane, and have some questions, particularly regarding the wattage in a power supply for an eventual setup.

Currently I have one Nvidia 240 w/1gb. I'm wanting to use this for the 'display' card.
Since the 470's & 480's seem to be considered the best 'bang-for-buck', I'm likely going to purchase a 470 sometime soon (480 a bit too high priced, sadly).
Eventually, I'd love to have two 470's for rendering and the 240 for display.

I just purchased an ATX board that can handle 3 graphics cards, and a case to house them.
I'm trying to stay budget-conscious, but don't want to corner myself for the future (like I did with the mini-itx case) -- so in regards to a PSU, how many watts should I need to be safe? I'm likely going to have 1 main 7200rpm system drive, and then I'm likely going to raid 0 two old 7200rpm drives for a scratch disk, and I'll also have my meager 60gb SSD in there as well. Optical drive is a possibility as well.

And then, of course, there's the graphics cards. Only a 240 and 470 to start, but wanting to keep the 'window open' for a 3-card setup.

Any suggestions on wattage, or specific PSU's? Trying to stay budget conscious -- for example, the motherboard is a used board, and the case was $79 (could have gone cheaper, but want sufficient cooling for everything packed in there...).

Thank you everyone; very excited to get to going with Octane!

John

[mib2berlin]

Hi, you need 250 watt for one gtx 470 and 120 watt for gt 240 and about 150 for your system (Max).
So a good 800/850 watt psu corzair or similar is ok for your rig.
I thing the best 'bang-for-buck` atm. is gtx 560 ti 2GB, less power, less noise, more VRam.

Cheers, mib.

[johnb4467]

Hi, and thanks so much for the reply.

So you would recommend the 560 Ti over the 470 or 480, even though it has less CUDA cores than latter options (384 for 560 Ti vs 448 on a 470)? To be honest, I'm not even sure how much of a real-world difference that makes; I'm mostly going off of numbers at this point. It looks like the higher VRAM models are quite a bit higher in price (not surprisingly), but would the vram be preferable over the CUDA cores?

Thanks so much; not being difficult -- just looking to make educated decisions...and since Octane is pretty unique in its configuration flexibility & functionality, this is pretty much my main source of information.

John

[mib2berlin]

There are 4 different 560 on market GTX 560, 560 Ti and 560 Ti 448 cores.
A special version is the GTX 560 Ti 384 2 GB TWIN with two x 384 cores, but they share the 2 GB VRam (Max 1 GB for octane).

The GTX 560 Ti 448 1280 MB cost similar to the GTX 470 in germany if you get one, i found GTX 470 only on ebay.

http://www.google.de/products/catalog?c ... #scoring=p

If you get a cheap GTX 470, go for it, it is a very good card for octane.

Cheers, mib.

[johnb4467]

Thank you very much for your suggestions and feedback -- it's greatly appreciated.

[johnb4467]

Hi again,

I did indeed end up getting a 560Ti 448.
Since it sounds like these cards are going to "disappear" quite quickly (any consensus on how long they will last?), should I grab another once before they're all gone? Or would mixing-and-matching not be a big deal in octane (ie: a 470 or 480, etc instead of another 560ti 448), since I'm seeing a lot of used 470's and 480's being sold online due to 'upgrades' for holiday gifts.