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Go back 12 months to the year 2005, when we all had funky lime green flares and Starsky & Hutch was on TV... it would have been questionable for all but extreme overclockers with SLI or CF to need a 700 watt power supply. Fast-forward to the present day, with freely available expensive energy, cheap fights (bungee!), and peace on earth (disclaimer: exclude 99% of earth), and I find myself recommending above and beyond 600 watt units more and more often. This situation certainly hasn't been helped by the inauguration of the 8800 series from Nvidia, and will simply get worse with ATI/AMD/DAAMIT's R600. It really is more important than ever for those running fast systems to treat the power supply with respect, and stay away from those nasty 650W triple fanned units with gold grills and a disco globe, that was so 2005, move on!
If you're one of those strange fellows who don't overclock your system and don't have any intentions toward dual GPU's, a 700W power supply will be overkill, no doubt about it. Even with SLI or Crossfire a 600W unit will do the job just dandy. However, if you do overclock and use SLI/CrossFire, or none of the former but find yourself eyeballing the 8800GTX with double vision, a 700W unit wouldn't be a bad idea at all. Before i carry on with this introduction, I'd like to point you towards an earlier article - SLI Power Supply Roundup. I recommend reading the first few pages as it explains why power supplies are important, how they are rated, and why you should avoid cheap units passing themselves off as '600W models'.
This year at Computex, it was clear that power requirements for high end desktops are not going to slow down, in fact they are just about to get complicated. Every single manufacturer that dabbles with power supplies had small "add on" units on display designed specifically to power GPU's. It's interesting to note that Nvidia's 8800 series has now debuted, yet these add on units are not really the important addition 'they' said they'd be, and it's likely R600 will not be so excessive in power requirements to need one either. It's
probable
these units have been designed specifically to address issues far beyond simple SLI or CrossFire, like hardware accelerated physics processing utilizing three or more high end GPU's. Both Nvidia and ATI have committed to this path, its coming, and with it power requirements are going to creep up once again.
For now, however, the 600 to 700W units look to be the sweet spot for high end systems, they offer enough headroom for some serious overclocking, but not so much so that the extra premium for the unit was an absolute waste of money (1kw units anyone?).
In this review, I'll be looking at two popular units - the FSP FX700-GLN Epsilon and the Thermaltake Tough Power 650W, I'll be testing them under multiple conditions with X1900 CrossFire and a high end Core 2 Duo setup (X6800).
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Seasonic M12 700W Power Supply
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