Advice on adding second power supply.

X850PRO is better than the X1600 series.

I would suggest a 6800 series, if you can find it.

you prolly wont find a PSU, you may have to use the 5.25" PSU's

Surely they would be too power hungry for a 250W with all that other equipment. I'm gonna look and see if I can scavenge one from work and just run it outside the system. I also don't want to spend too much on this stuff. Just enough so I can play some newer games on medium settings if need be. The AGP card will become worthless to me when I upgrade to pci-e.

Thank you! Unfortunately, I must be on a streak of bad luck, because I happen to have an 8100:

You shouldn't be worried about total power draw, IE 5.5v and 3v, you should woory about 12V draw. What are the specs on the side of your PSU, and, what is the E numer..... there should be an underwriters number on that psu.... underneath the RU..... should look something like this.... E12345.....
how many amps on the 12V rail?

I think that PSU would run it...... that is a low power system you are running.... the 1.3 doesn't draw a whole lot.

I will look up the E number and specs when I get home. One thing I noticed is that it said 250W max output. Well the cards I looked at recommend atleast a 300W to run.

When you say 12V rail, are you talking about the yellow wire on the molex connector that would be plugged into the video card? Or can I test any yellow wire? Also, to test current I need to have the PSU on with devices connected to create a load, correct?

I did find a couple older PSUs at work. I was surprised to find that the molex connectors were Red-Black-Black-Orange. There was an orange wire rather than a yellow. Is this still 12 V?

All you really have to do in order to find what it is SUPPOSED to put out on the 12V rail is multiply the 12V rail aperage by 12..... IE.... 15A*12V=180W.....
Even though ATI suggests a 350W PSU, it doesn't mean you need to waste money and buy one..... all you need to make sure of is that your 12V rail is not exceeded. It will be fairly easy to tell, your computer will simply shut off IF your PSU does it's job when the power is exceeded. But you should not have any issues.... I would not waste any time or money on it..... but that's just me.... and my suggestion.....

Valis-people tend to suggest getting 700W-1Kw psu's on here and it doesn't really matter how many times I say it, those suggestions still pop up, very few people would need that amount of power. And as you just said, you have a single rail PSU with alot of wattage on that rail.... I probably would not buy a daul rail psu for the simple fact that one of the rails is supposed to be for the CPU only.... and then the other rail is for all other 12V. IE, if someone intended to SLI, alot of the dual rail psu's would push 2 x1900xt's..... but your PSU would do it like a champ with almost 400W's on that rail. However the 3-4 12v rail psu's look nice.... but at the same time, most of those are above 600W and 600W would probably be the max I would buy, and since I don't ever plan on running SLI again, and probably won't ever buy an X-Fire setup..... I should NEVER need that much power.

Thanks
wes

ZOldDude.. well thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure you read everything though because I did say I'm building. But not until things settle down in the CPU market.. and I'm also waiting on problems to creep up with perpendicular recording technology so they can get ironed out. Anyway it might not be for like 6 months anyway, in my case. So I have a piece of shirt system now that I want to get some better gaming out of. Really, it can't handle any FPS game from the last two years. I tried Doom 3 on lowest settings possible, 640x480 and I couldn't even hit 8 fps.. it was bad.

You know, I could upgrade the 1.3 GHz to 2.0 for $30 on ebay. And spend $70 on a 9800pro. And "acquire" an extra PSU from work to run the card... but I'm not sure it'd be worth it. So I'll trudge along on this piece of t-shirt and be wowed by the massive upgrade down the road.

Well I understand that the amps are key, but I really don't want to find my card underpowered down the road even if it sounds good on the sticker. I think it's in that gray area where is may or may not work. The card will be useless to me in that case since I'm dropping AGP in my build.

That's been my problem all along and has really limited my upgrade path. They made a power adapter but my model happens to be an exception and therefore, SOL. I do know of a company that sells 400W replacements for my model.. but they are asking over $100 which is a load of bullshirt if you ask me.

Ima go sit and fume while technology passes me by once again. :?

Here's the problem: your motherboard uses two proprietary power connectors (24 pin connector with only 23 wires; 16 pin connector with only 9 wires). I have not found an adapter on the market that converts a standard 24pin PSU power cable into Dell's proprietary design. Here are the specs of your power connectors:

http://docs.us.dell.com/support/ed [...] .htm#power

Do not plug a standard 24-pin PSU into your board. They are wired differently.

This is the only option I found for upgrading my Dell PSU through someone besides Dell:

http://www.pcpowercooling.com/prod [...] show=S41D1

But for 99 bucks.. well maybe you can check on eBay or something. Me? I'm just gonna upgrade the entire shabang in a little while. Trust me, even with that new graphics card your 8100 is gonna be bleedin to keep up in the next year or so.

Sounds like you have decided against the add-on power supply, but I'll just add one more caution for that plan: you would need to be sure that the ground on the original PS output was at the same potential as the ground on the new PS output. Otherwise, current could flow between your video card and MB on "ground" lines in what is called a "ground loop".

Interesting. Just what exactly would this ground loop do to my system? If both PSUs were plugged into the same power strip, would this guarantee they were at the same potential?

Take into consideration that if attempting to make you computer upgradeable, the only components that are decreasing in power demands are the CPUs.

Newer technologies are demanding more wattage and, also, more amps for the draw, which alot of people tend to overlook just because they favor a certain brand of PSU. The newer GPUs, if you plan to consider them for the future are going to be extremely demanding. The G80 is reported to demand 175 watts and the R600 200 Watts. That being said, just to be safe, anything less than 17amps per rail over a multiple rail system and you will be having to look for another PSU

I hadn't know whether this PSU you were looking for was to last for future upgrades or not and I was meerly cautioning you. Just trying to be helpful

You might be standing in a very long line.