Power Supply Recommendations

I'm thinking of raising my PSU from 400 to 550 Watts.

Good ones by brand name would help a lot.

I have two DVD drives, Two HDD's, AthlonXP Proc., FDD and three fans running. My pSU is 4 years old.

Thanks...

 

I'm running a 400W power supply on my Athlon XP 2400+, 2 optical drives, 2 hard drives, floppy drive and 3 fans. The power supply is a 5 year old Raid Max (not considered a good brand) that is still within voltage specifications. Usually a decent PSU should last about 100,000 hours. When I clean the dust out of my heatsink and fans (every 3 months) I blow the dust out of the PSU.

Sites I refer to for power supplies. One is a bit outdated but still reliable.

Before Making a Thread About Buying a PSU....

Power Supplies 101: A comprehensive guide

 

Thanks Pete That calc site said 277 watts. I think I'll stick with the 550 watt supply. That is 2 times the actual....

 

Great link, Whiskeyman.

I vote for your post to be a sticky.

Other sticky's should be for MOBO's etc.

 

Bmoore, is there a particular reason why you want to upgrade your PSU? Are you thinking of adding drives or buying a beefy video card?

If no problems are present, why not hold off on the upgrade until you upgrade your whole system to the "next" generation - whatever that may be for you.

Today's biggest power suckers are high-end video cards - especially those by ATI. Their power reqts. are sky-high and I hear it may get worse. Dual video cards in SLI may require a 1 kilowatt PSU and some vgas may actually come stock with water-cooling!

The "Rolls-Royce" of PSUs are made by PC Power and Cooling. The "Ferrari" of PSUs are those OCZ Powerstreams. I'd say the most recommended PSU and one that's good for the majority of people is Antec.

I used to use Antec exclusively but got bored of them and got tired of their kind-of-high prices. When I needed a 550W PSU, I actually went with this one from Rosewill. It's been running fine for over a year now even with a viciously overclocked Athlon 64 3500+ and an ATI X1900GT. As such, I've kind of backed off my recommendation that you really should buy Antec.

 

Chiles4, I was having mult. BSOD's and had narrowed it down to CPU or PSU. I got my new CPU installed and have not had a BSOD in two days. Also went up to 2000+ (1667).

My box is a 4 year old home built and have not decided what the "next generation" would mean for me. I don't do gaming and as long as my video card shows me a pix in color, I'm O.K.

 

Bmoore, report back if you have more troubles. The majority of BSODs are probably due to software with some due to memory. A bad PSU usually fails to boot or causes reboots. CPUs very rarely go bad.

Gary