430W Power Supply Question

[d0lorous dave]

Will 430W be enough to run an Athlon 64 X2 4600, 1 hard drive, 1 DVD-RW drive, an Audigy 2 and a GeForce 7950?

In addition, is there any gaming performance benefit to upgrading from the Audigy 2 to the newest Audigy card?

 

[Kromis]

I would say so...but first...

What brand is your power supply? I mean, which one do you have?

 

[d0lorous dave]

It's an Antec Truepower 2.0 430W. Thanks for the quick reply!

 

[Bobthelost]

The TPII range is ok, but they don't age all that well (ie they degrade due to age faster than most). If it's more than say three years old i'd be thinking aobut replacing it.

As far as gaming performance increases go, no, none. The sound quality may improve but that's about all a new sound card will do for you.

 

[d0lorous dave]

I didn't think the sound card made a difference but I wanted to be sure it wouldn't be a performance bottleneck. I had read somewhere that the new soundcards have onboard RAM or something to offload the sound from the CPU. Thanks for the fast reply!

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

There are some small gains in performance, but yeah the main difference would be to try to improve sound quality. If you have nice headphones or very nice speakers it might be something to consider.

If you're just looking to increase performance, you would most likely be better off putting that money towards a new videocard etc.