I'm building a new computer and am wondering about power needs. How can you determine what wattage power supply is needed? What is it dependent on? Any help would be great. Thanks.
The average pc madetoday should have no LESS than a quality 400w power supply and preferably a 420w or higher for future upgrades/additions in hardware and EXTERNAL components. Personally, I would add another 12-15% to the amount stated on the vbutils.com site. I feel they are too low, but it still gives you another comparison. I go mostly from experience and the fact that we have thousands of systems in the market that have run for years with no problems.
I've started looking at power supplies at newegg.com and it honestly looks like the cheapest one they have will supply her setup with all of the power it needs to each rail. Here are her specs:
Athlon XP 2000+ CPU
Mobo w/integrated devices
3 fans
512MB DDR RAM
AGP Graphics card
2 IDE drives
CD-RW
Floppy drive
Keyboard
Mouse
USB thumb drive
Using that site I added up the estimated current consumption going over each rail and those are the figures I came to (rounding up).
If you go to this page:
Hey guys, I've figured out my power consumption needs from this site:
I've started looking at power supplies at newegg.com and it honestly looks like the cheapest one they have will supply her setup with all of the power it needs to each rail. Here are her specs:
Athlon XP 2000+ CPU
Mobo w/integrated devices
3 fans
512MB DDR RAM
AGP Graphics card
2 IDE drives
CD-RW
Floppy drive
Keyboard
Mouse
USB thumb drive
Using that site I added up the estimated current consumption going over each rail and those are the figures I came to (rounding up).
You can see that the first power supply meets my needs, at least from the estimated current consumption perspective. I know the cheapest power supply isn't necessarily going to last long, but I want to make sure that I'm not going crazy and that these figures and what I've found are correct. Maybe I'm missing something, as the first power supply is only a 250W power supply. Any help would be great.
I believe that you mis-read the article you refer to. A system such as the one you listed SHOULD have NO LESS than a quality 300w power supply and that allows for NO upgrades. A 350w/400w/420wwould be preferred. The AMD 2000+ requires a power supply of that size in a system such as you listed just because of the 12v rail voltages. A quote from the link you posted:
"Conclusion
So what does this mean? When you shop for power supplies, you should always watch for the +12V lead. The majority of low-cost power supplies you see at computer shows tend to have +12V rails with 10 or 12A. No matter how many total watts the power supply may have, youre setting yourself up for instability if you buy that power supply.
It states that even 10A or 12A +12v rails are underpowered and not recommended. The power supply you suggest is only 9A!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You should consider this for the money:
You're not going to find quality power supplies with those kind of specs that these will offer for the money (and dependability and stability as proven by thousands of our builds). We've used these inexpensive power supplies for years in low midrange to workstation (24/7/365) level for years with no problems. For high-midrange on up systems we use StarTech(expensive but oh so great).
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