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The need for power - Watt Did You Say? 

The dreaded word in the industry: power consumption and with Dual-Core CPU technology & a fun number of 4 GPU's in your system you'd think that power consumption would get way out of hand right ?

Well obviously a stable 12-volt power source for best performance, reliability and most of all that gaming experience of yours is a must. NVIDIA recommends a 600 Watt PSU, which we can concur. We measured the total amount of wattage used from the PC to have a look at power consumption, the results where less freighting than expected for sure.

What we always do with new graphics' cards, we measure the wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the entire PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. So please understand that using a Watt meter is not the most reliable way of measuring power consumption.

We basically look at how much power is the power circuit from your house pulling from the PSU. So you need to look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science.

 Oh not bad, we did not peak above 420 Watts at all!

I suggest you need a 600 Watt PSU at least, better is always recommended though. When you buy a new PSU you need to look at the packaging and check the amperage on the 12 volts rail, make sure it's 50 AMPs in total.

Here are some indications on what would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load:

• unusual fluctuating 3D gaming performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous resetting PC
• freezes during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down or shut down

With that being said let's fire up a couple of games and see how well Quad-SLI is behaving.

With the help of a Multi-meter we can easily detect fluctuations on the 12v power distribution lines.