I know the point is of a powered riser is to take the load off the motherboard and prevent it from overloading, but with a good motherboard (I use the MSI 970a G43) should that be necessary with only 3 R9 280x's?
I'm sitting here with some powered risers I bought from eBay, and I'm worried about using them in case they cause a fire while I'm not around. Anyone ever experienced any problems/issues with powered risers before (in terms of them overheating, shorting, spontaneously combusting?)
TIA
Additional question. I'm planning on running 3 x Sapphire R9 280x's on the motherboard with a 1000W Corsair modular PSU. I think I've done the maths right and this PSU should have enough power. I read in a number of posts a single 280x pulls a max of 250W, so that's 750W for the cards and about 150W for the Mobo, AMD Sempron CPU, and Sata HDD. Still leaves 100W spare. Does that sound about right?
Both risers and non-risers can cause fire if you overload it. Just make sure to have riser for the 4th GPU and above..