SLi Power supply?

[GRunyon]

I'm trying to build myself an ultra nice gamer machine... mainly used for MMORPG's... for under 1000 dollars.

I'll be using a 45 dollar Cooler Master case and it needs a power supply. I'm going to be running an AMD 4200+ Dual Core Processor, ATI Radeon 1950 GT 512mb, 2GB Ram, etc. So it needs to be something big... I was thinking 450w or bigger. The thing is... I was hoping to make it SLi ready so down the road when Christmas comes I can ask for another Radeon 1950GT and hook them together for an unbeatable experience... at least compared to the 1GHZ Dell I'm writing to you from, now.

Do I really need to get an 'SLi Compatable' power supply? If I do, I probably wont even bother spending 120 bucks on a Lanparty SLi compatable mobo...

So.... do I really need that?

 

[mailpup]

First, you have a problem with your choice of graphics cards. For SLI you have to use Nvidia cards. If you prefer to use ATI graphics cards, you will want Crossfire.

I think there are two basic criteria for being SLI or Crossfire compatible, just off the top of my head. One is it has to have sufficient power to run two graphics cards and two, is it has to have two proper power connections for both cards. The Nvidia site lists power supplies that are compatible although the list may not be fully up to date. For top of the line SLI graphics card pairs, the recommendations are for like 650-700W power supplies or higher.