I just realized that they may not make a PSU with enough wattage or connectors to drive a dual E5 system with 4 GPUs (possibly some of them having more than one GPU chip on board, such as with the HD 7990 or a possible future GTX 790).
Could it be possible that the PSU may put a cap on my wish to build a system with two CPU slots and four GPUs in a bench, tower, or free-standing form factor?
If you look at prices for all these parts, we're talking about a $5,000 to $6,000 system. I can't do that all at once. But I would like to do it in phases over the course of the next two or three years. Which means that the PSU (or multiple PSUs?) should be planned and sized early in the project so that I won't have to scramble when it's time to place an order.
For reference, this is going to be a high-compute machine for the great majority of time, and it will run F@H 24/7 except when I send it GPGPU work from my main workstation. It will probably live in the guest bedroom and will likely serve as a web browser when visitors come and stay; guests who don't arrive with their own laptop, that is... Heat generation will not be insignificant, so for comfort I plan to stop folding when guests are over.
It will be set up for Steam and therefore might be used for games on occasion, but probably not often; and certainly no need for Crossfire or SLI; just multiple badass GPUs for compute and one to drive a single big monitor.
Is this plan feasible with just one very big PSU, or am I getting into rarified air here? If multiple PSUs are needed, how do you do that and satisfy the 24-pin load on the second PSU...and where do you put a second PSU?
I also have a semi-related case topic. It was a judgement call, but I decided to separate the two.