Sorry you don't think it makes sense... That seems like a bold statement to make from my standpoint!
http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com/Power
Think about all of the things that need to be powered:
- 3 x gtx 580
- 2 x 5690 hexacore cpu
- 2 x pump (55w each)
- 1 x pump controller card
- 1 x 6-channel fan controller @ 30w per channel
- 1 x 5-channel fan controller @ 60w per channel (each 200cfm triebwerk fan requires almost 15w! There are 8)
- 12 x dimm
- 4 x hard drives
- 1 x flash drive (w/ room for more)
- 32 x fan
- 1 x sound card
And, that's just off the top of my head, and doesn't include overclocking 3 video cards, and two cpus...
If you think one 1200w power supply can run all that, well, I don't know what to say...
Aside from power considerations, another reason for dual power supplies is redundancy... everything is effectively doubled: two cpus, two psus, two pumps. If one of each goes down, the system can still run until a replacement is in place... keep in mind that an outage for me equals lost revenue.
30" monitors - waiting on the next gen that will hopefully include IPS and LED...
Gentle Typhoons - the 1850 rpm ones which are considered the best fan for static pressure and low noise weren't available in bulk from the vendor I went with for most of my parts when I built the system , but did look around for them... (newegg for main components, frozen cpu for additional stuff) - just checked again and they are
still out of stock. Also wasn't a big fan from an aesthetic standpoint, so didn't really try to scour the earth for them.
Overclocking - overclocking two cpus is orders of magnitude more difficult than just doing one - you are essentially OC'ing each cpu and are limited by the lower of the two. The system has only been up for about a month and I have been pretty swamped so I haven't had a chance to do extensive OC'ing and torture testing but I am stable at 4.3ghz... I could disable one cpu, and some memory, and easily hit higher numbers, but I need massive parallelism over higher clock speeds, otherwise I would have gone with a i7-x3960. To date I don't know of anyone that has OC'd a SR-2 build on air/water to higher than 4.6ghz, and the person who achieved that actually works for eVGA! My info on this may be a little out of date but not by more than a month or two...
Quote:
Edit: Retracted my statement, as I didn't see your last post. Overkill is right, to the point where it doesn't make sense. Why two power supplies? Why not go with 30" monitors? No Gentle Typhoons? I could go on.
What do you have those cpu's oc'd to? I would hope they are in the 5.0+ range with that cooling setup.