Can I run crossfire on a Gigabyte EP45T-USB3P motherboard?
I have the exact same board. It does support 8x crossfire, that means that a single GPU will run at 16 x speed , but duals will run at 8x each, this means that you will not get 200% performance over a single GPU, more like 125%, this is not bad in itself, as cheaper boards only support 8x/4x. But from personal experience with this board, i know you will have all kinds of problems, due to your system being overclocked. The p45 chipset in this board is overburdened by overclocks, and will cause constant crashes when crossfire is used, this does not happen on stock speeds, I experienced all kinds of crashes with two 5770, but non with a single or a single GTX 470. Gigabyte has also not released any bios updates for this board, making investing in it not a sound decision.Your PSU is completely unsuited for crossfire, not enough watts and cooler master uses cheap capacitors that will fail. You need at least 800watts on a single rail, preferably from a good brand like Corsair. a single 6850 is plenty fast. My advice is to use a single and keep system overclocked, and sell your extra 6850. or upgrade to an amd x6 1090t and abandon the core duo boards. Make sure that when you buy a motherboard, that it has consistent bios updates, i had to learn the hard way.
Video Cards: 128bit versus 256bit, SLI, Crossfire, etc. Help please!?
Yes, combining two 5770's in Crossifre does yield impressive results: http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_p... However, I'd choose a single 5850. It's almost always better to have a single high-end card from the standpoint of lower power consumption and heat output. Besides, some games don't scale well with Crossfire & SLI, so performance doesn't improve much over a single card, sometimes only 20-30% better. Crossfire and SLI are great as cheap insurance for future upgrading. For example, 18 months from now there will probably be faster new-generation cards available- but for much less than a newfangled hot card, you can snag another 5850 or 5870 (which will be much cheaper by then). In this case it's a non-factor, but don't get too distracted by the memory interface size. For example the 128-bit Radeon 4770 performs almost identically with the 256-bit Radeon 485 and GTS 250. It turns out having faster memory offsets the smaller pipeline. In this case, the 128-bit/GDDR5 combination is equivalent to the older 256-bit/GDDR3 approach.
How many volts of electricity does a home desktop require for running?
An average desktop computer uses between 60 and 300 watts. It is very difficult to know exactly how much computers use on average because there are so many different hardware configurations. The computer power supply is not an accurate way to measure energy use because the power supply output is advertised as the max amount of watts a power supply can output. The electricity usage of a computer also heavily depends on the video card, a high end video card can use a lot of power and having more than one (SLI or Crossfire mode) during heavy gaming or 3d rendering can use a large amount of energy. We estimate that an average modern desktop PC will use approximately 100 watts of power, not including the display screen.
Is it possible to run two non-SLI graphics cards in one motherboard?
Actually, you can, but it's useful only for a specific reason — if you have more than one monitor. You can use one graphics card to run one monitor, and the second to run the other monitor. Even this is useful only if you do two GPU-intensive tasks at the same time, like play a game on one monitor and do 3D rendering on the other, or something similar.So, if you have two monitors, and a system capable of running two graphics cards, and the specific use case scenario mentioned above, then you can use two cards without running them in SLI. You'll also need a powerful CPU with at least 6 cores, if not more, to handle both the workloads at the same time.You can do it even if you don't have that kind of usage, but then it's pretty much a waste of money, because there's no way to add the power of one GPU to the other without using SLI. And running two monitors with two powerful GPUs, but using only one to its full potential, is a waste of money in my opinion.Hope this helps. Cheers!
Is a 500 watt power supply enough?
Follow my link below, it has a calculator. I just estimated you'd be around 400 watts, but that's not including any fans, or anything else you add later, etc. Remember a 500 watt psu is peak wattage, so figure 450 working. I would suggest going up to 550 or 650, somewhere in that range. Nice to have a buffer and it will help with system stability.