PCA Forums

Hey, a friend of mine is upgrading his computer... to say the least

He has an Enermax 350W power supply

Here is what he is hooking up to it:

P4 3GHz 800MHz FSB
Abit IC7
512MB PC3200
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro
2 Hard drives
1 CD-RW/DVD
1 floppy
2 huge mother$^#&ing 120mm fans (i mean big....)
1 92mm fan
1 80mm fan
Fan controller
NIC
perhaps a few other misc small things

I told him that will really push a 350W PSU.... but the Enermax could do it if any 350W can. I run my system on the same power supply, and i have 2 roms, 2 hard drives, five 80mm fans, one 92mm fan, nForce 2 mobo.... etc. Mine is fine. Now i know everyone always says you need more power than you do... so realistically, will this setup be ok? He is going to try it anyways, break or not.... i'm just curcious to see what other people think.

I believe he'll be ok.


Check this out

Blade, that's a real cool website - I like it!

He'll probably be ok with that PSU and all, but if it was me I wouldn't tempt fate ya know? Newegg has Sparkle 550W PSU's for $90 and Antec TrueBlue 480W PSU's for $84, so it'd be in his best interest to just go out and upgrade that as well. I did that webpage on it that blade posted and got 364watts.
I'd get a beefier PSU just to errase any concerns about it not working right anyway.

For Example: I had a 1Ghz P3 Tualatin system with a NIC, 4 sticks of ram, SB Audigy, 3 SCSI HDDs, SCSI card, 2 IDE hdds, floppy, CD-RW, CD-ROM, and GeForce3 all connected to a 300w PSU.
It booted up and worked fine - but it would randomly crash and was basically unstable. Pull out the old PSU and throw in a 400W, and not a single problem after that.
Since then, I've sort of gone with the attitude of "more is better" with PSUs. My wife has a 450w PSU in her machine, and all it has is an XP 2100+, 1 stick ram, 2 HDDs and a CD-RW. Definately overkill, but I'd rather have to much PSU then not enough!