On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 at 12:59:32, Eric Wheeler wrote: > > On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 12:52 -0700, Daniel Herrington wrote: > > 350W Antec Basiq PSU > > MSI motherboard w/ onboard video > > 1.2 gb ram > > 2 300 gb Drives > > 1 36 GB dirve > > 1 DVD burner > > Power supplies run near optimal at ~80% of specification. Running > them well below spec wastes lots of power and heat in switching.
I wouldn't advise you to try to make do with an undersized power supply. Last year I had to buy a couple of power supplies because what is now my old socket A firewall box suffered a catastrophic cascading failure that blew up its power supply (along with the motherboard, CPU, SCSI card and one disk drive), and I used that as an excuse to build out a new machine in addition to fixing the old one. Trawling the net to figure out what I needed I found a couple of reviews and some other information. Search and ye shall find, but the upshot is that modern solid-state switching power supplies are most efficient near 60-65% of rated capacity, with far lower efficiency when lightly loaded, as well as closer to full capacity. So, you don't want to go overboard and put a big 750W extreme gaming rig power supply in a system built with a low-TDP CPU chip and onboard video but neither do you want to skimp on the power supply if you are building a system with a 95W-120W processor and a power sucking PCI-e video card, several disk drives, a DVD drive and maybe a sound and/or TV tuner card. A high-quality power supply that's strong enough to easily handle all of the kit you might ever put in the box is perhaps the best investment for long-term reliability you can make when building a new system, or fixing up an old one. Stable, ripple-free voltages that stay up to spec count. There's a pretty good power supply calculator here - use the 'lite' one: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp I ended up with an Antec 500W Basiq PSU for the old firewall box, 'cause there was a rebate. And I bought a 650W Antec TPIII for the new system, which has an Athlon64 X2 5600 with an ATI HD3870 video card, a SCSI card with two small 10K RPM drives, plus a larger SATA drive and a DVD drive. Hope that helps, Robert
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