Are single rails PSUs better or Dual rails better?

Rona Espalin: FINALLY a good question :Dok so this is how it works(just throwin random numbers out here)your CPU takes 30% of poweryour HDD takes up 15% of poweryour DVD drive takes up 15% of poweryour Video Card takes up 30% of poweryour ram/mobo takes up 10% of power(again random numbers, dont yell at me cause i know they are way off)now imagine this, your video card NEEDS more power, to run stable, so it starts sucking out power from the CPU, slowin you down.throw in dual rails and its like a wall, wont suck any more power out of it, so things run alot more stable, but other stuff is in consideration, so you run out of power alot less..i personally have a quad rail PSU, the only stable/good thing these days. *i have dual 8800GT's and a quad core, the asus striker extreme and 4 gigs of ram*so i need quad rails...Show more

Penelope Armond: Usually two rails is two 12 volt rails. Here's some info from wikipedia about it:In computer power supplies that have more than! one 12V power rail, it is preferable for stability reasons to spread the power load over the 12V rails evenly to help avoid overloading one of the rails on the power supply.

Jimmie Doerfler: Depends on your motherboard, some can take multiple.. some can only take one. The ones that take multiple will know how to handle the power going through and distribute it properly.

Vernita Robberson: It was mandated that +12V rails not exceed 20amps so you see a lot of PSUs with multiple rails but some just have one massive +12V rail like the 550watt Corsair which has a single 41amp rail. This "you need a separate rail for each video card" is total BS as you can easily run SLIs on a PSU with a massive single rail--lots of people do it!. People who think you need a rail per card know nothing about how electricity and PSUs work. Here's a post that should help clear things up.:http://www.overclock.net/faqs/88626-info-do-you-ne......Show more