EVE General Discussion

Well to be fair a 460 is not a particularly power hungry card in fact if you look at the high res version of your chart that I linked the power draw on a gtx460 is right around the 250w he's claiming (actually it's a bit lower but there are other things in the system that draw power )

I do agree that calls to get a 1000w PSU are probably overkill as pretty damned near every existing video card will run perfectly fine on a 650w PSU save for more extreme SLI and Crossfire setups. I only see 3 configurations that would be pulling enough power to require something bigger than a 850w PSU and those all have at least 3 video cards. In fact I'd say unless you were running a 3X or 4X GTX480 or a X4 GTX580 there really isn't much point in anything bigger than an 850w and odds are a 650w or 750w would serve just fine if you want to go economical.

My personal advice is shoot for quality over raw wattage, a good power supply will set you back at least $100 bucks and more like $150-200 for something that will give you a little overhead for future expansion. The quality differences between a good well build PSU with quality components and the cheap budget crap is huge, and a poor quality power supply can cause all sorts of hard to track down errors and failures. It's just a good idea to buy a good high quality model.

As I said in my original reply something you can't really go wrong with something from Seasonic, Corsair, XFX or NZXT these are the 4 I researched recently and all three brands are first rate (went with the NZXT because I couldn't find a XFX or Seasonic locally and I was too impatient to wait for one to ship), if you go with something else just be sure to do a little research to see if they are any good, find some reviews from someone like Jonnyguru who has proper testing equipment and really stress tests them before buying.

I run a Phenom II x4 965 BE on an ASUS M4A89GTD/USB3 Pro MoBo with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and an ATI Radeon HD4890 eGPU. CQ runs at 54.5fps. FiS is pegged at 120fps. All settings/options max/on and brackets on. The only time I ever get slowdown or lag is due to server lag or massive fleet battles (400+) with brackets on. Then I start turning stuff down.

With any half decent rig, you should be able to dual or triple box without worry. In my case, any more than that and I will need more RAM before anything else. Also, I noted since eve s single thread, onyl 1 core is showing useage and that is at about 40%. So plenty of processing power.

The only worry you might have is GPU or CPU temp. I noted my CPU fan spools up to about 50% while running CQ on max settings. Invest in a good CPU fan.

Running two accounts here at 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 in Fixed Window mode at max settings on my M17x. The M17x has two GTX 280M. But I am just using one for EVE because in SLI and EVE window mode it will cause DPC Latency. The result ingame is a shield/cap bug and you get usually stucked at a gate with an endless session timer after beeing afk for a while.

But one card is working perfect here. 60 FPS on both clients with AA.

Have you considered taking them out of SLA mode and just running one monitor off each? That's the setup I have,

My system is kind of a frankenbox since as a parent my budget for PC stuff is never large enough to upgrade every component at the same time and I'm usually limited to a couple hundred bucks for any given upgrade.

Long story short I'd ended up with a motherboard that could support up to 4 PCIe 8x cards (or 2 16x) and an 8800GT that was just sitting in a box gathering dust. So a little research and a PSU upgrade, I had one of those crap PSUs X-connect2 and this gave me an excuse to rectify that problem . So I stuck that 8800 in one of my extra PCIe slots and set it up to run my secondary monitor.

My current setup is a 28inch lcd being run by my ENGTX460TOP (factory OC card I picked up on clearance from Fry's) and a secondary 24inch lcd being run by that 8800GT. I run my main account on my 28inch on high settings at 1920X1200 with the CQ off and 4 accounts (my little semi-afk Ice mining OP) on my secondary monitor at 1920x1080 with lower quality settings. Both use fixed window mode, two EVE installs one for each monitor.

This setup runs fine though I found the CQ still degrades performance to unacceptable levels which kind of dashed my hope that the setup would allow me to run the CQ on my main account.

For what it's worth here are my specs

28 inch I-Inc monitor Absolutely love this thing price was amazing for what you get
ViewSonic VG2428wm - 24" Was a black Tuesday special while I waited for the I-Inc when both my CRTs crapped out on Thanksgiving night 2 years ago.
Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB : 2 x 4 GB DDR3
AMD Phenom II 1075t X6 3 GHz
ASUS ENGTX460 768 DDR5
eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT 512 DDR3
Antec P180 Tower
NZXT Hale90 850W
Corsair H50 closed loop liquid CPU cooler
Don't even recall what hard drives I have in it a couple Maxtor 500gb I think next big upgrade will be some sort of SSD.
Some DVD burner.

Like I said a Frankenbox but it does run 5 instances of EVE 3

Just wanted to say that installing eve on a SSD made my load time much faster - it takes now less than 25secs.

I took about 2mins before, on a regular HDD.