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How many watts should a power supply need? I heard that more watts=less crashes, and a number of people say things like 350 watts is the number to get right now, but I want to know: Am I buying a lot more watts than I need? I've been aiming at an Enermax 431 Watt PS.
Well the first obvious question would be, what are you running on the system? List everything.
Also let us know if you are gonna overclock at all.
AMD Athlon 2100 XP Processor (is it worth it?)
Thermaltake Dragon Orb 1 Heatsink/Cooling
Asus A7V333 KT333 Motherboard w/ USB 2.0 (DDR DRAM)
1 GB of PC2700 DDR RAM
120 GB Western Digital SE Hard Drive
Plextor PlexWriter 40/12/40 CD-RW
GeForce4 Ti 4600
SB Audigy Gamer
Rounded IDE Cables
Windows XP Professional
No modem (I will install a Motorola cable modem later) and I'm putting it in a plain hydraulic tower case. By the way, I'm not overclocking.
300 in the very minimum, 350+ is good for you. :)
Also get an Antec.
Get the biggest PSU you can afford, it can never hurt and you can never have too much.
PSU's only draw as much current as your system requires, that means you could have a 450 watt and a 300 watt PSU, and if your computer is only drawing 250 watts, then both PSU's will be running identical.
Some people believe that big PSU's draw alot of electricity and therefor run up your electric bill, but that is just a myth. Like I said up above, they only draw as much as needed.
So you will want as big a PSU as you can afford, because it will never hurt. It comes in handy if you ever happen to be doing alot of things at the same time....like playing games, listening to music, printing, scanning, etc...thats when a big PSU will kick in and give your system juice, where a small PSU might not provide adequate power and lockup your system or crash.
Hope this helped!
also get the ax-7 heatsink with a 46.9cfm panaflo fan it rocks.