Well, it all begun with my birthday in 2012 (19th of July). I was dumb, and I didn't do the research, I didn't pay bills, I just wanted more fps. Ok...So I've thought, why not buy another 560GTX? I would make a nice SLI, enjoy games in more detail, etc... I got the second card and started to google how the fuck I can make this work... After 3 days:
"Well shit" I tought, I have to call my PC guru friend. He told me, before buying it: "don't do this, you will kill the PSU and the performance will not be as good as you hope it will be!"
Oooh, but I didn't listen.
I took the pictures yesterday when I remembered
And where was one, it was another one...
And this was the PSU who actually survived 6 months with this... "built":
So he comes, he sees the damn mess I made, no wire management, no nothing. He starts to do his magic and voila, it works. The benchmarks were looking SO GOOD and I felt like emphasizing that to my friend who advised me against this. Of course I didn't know what kind of stress my PSU had, and never noticed the ever growing coil whine.
In the beginning, everything was good, I remember playing Metro 2033 and Crysis 2 I think it was. The fps was all over the place but hey, I was running on SLI, i was fucking cool... After that some GTA IV which was running like shit despite my config and bullshit sports games like FIFA and NBA. After that I took a little break. After 6 months I started some game, I don't remember which one, but it was graphically intensive, and my PSU starts to make this horror noise, I got scared and unplugged my PC (stupid thing to do I know).
I started to look into it and saw the power consumption figures:
- average around 150w/card - not very intensive games
- peak around 160w/card - intensive games
- maximum around 220w/card - stability benchmarks
I had an I7 920 if I remember correctly.
Imagine how good my idea was... Why did I kept them you may ask... Well, for some reason, I never found the time to put them on sale, and when I had the time I was forgetting about them... The following 2 years I just used on card, and after some time I had to buy a laptop Acer Aspire V3-772G, 17.3" , and when I found a stable place to live in and I got the money for the RX580, I made the recent external GPU build, which you can find here .
So, in conlusion, don't invest in SLI... it's silly and it's just for bragging...