450w good enough?

[lokni]

I have a 450w Austin that I have been using to power my Athlon Xp system. I am upgrading to an AMD Athlon 64 3500 running on an Abit AN8-SLI board. Also going into the system is a 8400GS vidcard, 1 gig of DDR ram, and 800 gigs across 3 HDDs, and 1 DVD burner.

Worst case, is this enough to get me going and upgrade later>?

 

[dclive]

300W runs the following for me:

Acer 965 motherboard
Quad 6600 (Q6600) CPU, fans, etc.
nVidia 8800GTS/320
4 SATA 500GB drives
4 1GB sticks
1 DVDRW
Hauppauge PVR-500 dual TV tuner card

Here's a current Anandtech rundown of power usage:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipse...howdoc.aspx?i=2903&p=7
(go to the power consumption page)

 

[lokni]

Damn. Ok. I started seeing all these 750w and 1KW PSUs and thought all the power requirements must have skyrocketed or something. Sounds like I should be fine then. Thanks.

 

[PurdueRy]

I would be surprised if that rig ever needed 200W

 

[John]

Not all psu's are created equally. Simply because one particular 300W psu can handle a heavy load doesn't mean they all can. I would not trust a 5 year old psu with current gen hardware, especially when you can spend $50-$70 on a quality psu with better voltage regulation, lower noise, and higher efficiency.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: lokni
Damn. Ok. I started seeing all these 750w and 1KW PSUs and thought all the power requirements must have skyrocketed or something. Sounds like I should be fine then. Thanks.

Bingo! And this is the exact problem. PSU requirements have actually gone DOWN (speaking of CPUs) - compared a Pentium D 3.4 with a Core 2 Duo lately? The C2D takes drastically less power - 20W or so, give or take.

And that I say "drastically" and "20W" ought to give folks a clue and how out of hand I think this 500W - 800W - 1000W business is getting.

 

[MarcVenice]

A fellow crusader !!! Lol j/k. Anyways, there is a difference between a no name brand PSU that sais 300W and a enermax/seasonic or any other reputable brand PSU that sais 300W. When it sais 400W a no name brand can usually deliver 400W, but not for a sustained period of time, and often at low efficiency too. A better brand can often deliver more W for sustained periods.

Having that said, enermax liberty 400W will power most rigs out there.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

The actual load of my overclocked (3.46GHz) E4300/Abit IP35-E/2GB DDR2 800/7100 GS/Antec SP350 rig is 191 watts under Orthos Large mode. Idle load is around 90 watts. Add another 90 watts to account for a high-end GPU. It is very rare for any single GPU rig to draw more than 300 actual watts.

A high-quality single-rail PSU with at least 24 continuous amps at the 12V rail will do the job. Dual rail is a little tricky because you must avoid overloading any single 12V rail. Look for a reputable PSU with at least 12V/12A x 2.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: SerpentRoyal
The actual load of my overclocked (3.46GHz) E4300/Abit IP35-E/2GB DDR2 800/7100 GS/Antec SP350 rig is 191 watts under Orthos Large mode. Idle load is around 90 watts. Add another 90 watts to account for a high-end GPU. It is very rare for any single GPU rig to draw more than 300 actual watts.

A high-quality single-rail PSU with at least 24 continuous amps at the 12V rail will do the job. Dual rail is a little tricky because you must avoid overloading any single 12V rail. Look for a reputable PSU with at least 12V/12A x 2.

You're also in something of a worst-case scenario (worst wattage, that is) because you're probably spiking the voltage on that CPU, which might be another 20 watts or so over normal usage (sometimes more, sometime less...)

Yes, the vast majority of people will be have under 300W of actual usage....many significantly under.