On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 17:24 -0800, MHR wrote:
On Jan 2, 2008 4:43 PM, Dennis Gilmore dennis@ausil.us wrote:
I would say its plenty big enough. I ran for many years a amd 2600+ box with 2xhdd's 3 optical drives, neon on the case a couple of fans, 1gb ram and a couple of pci cards and i used a 350watt power supply for it
I had another athlon64 3000+ system with 6 sata drives and 3 pci cards 1gb ram and two fans that used a 350watt power supply also
Either you were lucky or I was not - I burned out a 430w power supply with my rig:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ (2 x 2.0GHz) M/B: ECS NFORCE4M-A K/M: Logitech EX110 Cordless Desktop (keyboard & mouse) ram: 2GB OCZ DDR2 800MHz (PC6400) fdd: Panasonic 3 1/4" 1.44Mb hds: 160MB Maxtor PATA UDMA-133 & 120MB Maxtor PATA UDMA-133 sds: 300GB Seagate SATA-150/300 320GB WD SATA-150/300 dvd: Emprex 16x DVD+/-RW/Dual-Layer Hammer 16x DVD+/-RW/Dual-Layer/DVD-RAM vid: geFORCE7100gs (nVidia) PCI-E x16 mod: Agere Systems 56k WinModem (Lucent) cap: AverMedia Video Capture
It's a little different now (both DVD drives had to be replaced, for different reasons), and I've been using a 500w PS for about six months, no trouble.
Different mobos may have different needs. I had a 300 watt that was plenty for my Acer AK77-400 (MAx/N) but it consistently chocked when I put the Epox 9KRAI-Pro in that case. The Epox manual recommend >= 350 watts - it didn't lie.
Anyway, to the OP: each of your drives and other components will show maximum needs and your mobo manual may list its needs too. Add them up, add in a little fudge factor and you'll know.
IMO: I always try to run a PS rated *over* what I need. This is to run the PS far enough below it rating that it should run cooler than what it is rated for. Seems to make them last longer and be more reliable.
My Epox board is now on a 550 watt PS, allowing plenty of room for growth.
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