Will Antec Earthwatts 430 be enough?

[p3matty]

The egg has the Earth Watts 430 on sale right now, as I was thinking of getting it for the build I'll be doing before year's end. For reference is it 80 plus certified (which I did want in a new PSU), and has two 17 amp 12V rails with a combined 360 watts.

My new build will have an E2140 (possibly OC'ed to around 2.4Ghz) on a Gigabye P35-DS3R, 2 GB of Corsair DDR2 800, an XFX 8600GT (factory OC'ed to 620/1600), a 250 GB or 320 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and a Samsung DVD+-R/W drive. I may also throw on a SATA II card that I currently have as this board doesn't have many SATA ports, and maybe an old IDE DVD drive, and old IDE HD and a floppy drive. My current case will be used again, and it's an Antec Lanboy with 1 standard 120mm fan, and one 120mm LED fan. I'm pretty sure that this is still all well within the PSU's capabilities, though.

My big question relates to how much room will I have for future upgrades before needing to get a bigger PSU? Will I be able to get a Penryn quad core once they drop in price (dramatically)? Will I be able to upgrade the video card any (hopefully when the next series of cards come out 1-2 years out)? Should I drop an extra $20 down now to get the 500 watt version?

Thanks for any help you might have.

 

[nukemaster]

You should be able to run anything on the market now with the exception to hardcore setups like 8800gtx/ultra SLI and 2900XT Xfire. At the same time I bet even that may run but it would be starting to cut it close.

So lets say a Q6600 @ 3.0 and an 8800GTX with 6 hard drives 2 Optical drives FDD 4 sticks of ram and so on should run on there as long as the 360watts combined 12(thats 30 amps) is accurate. 80 plus is also good as it will save you power and heat in the long run too

With both video cards(8800gt and 2950's) and cpus(both amd and intel) going towards more power savings large psu's on medium-high end systems may be a thing of the past

The system you want should run with no problems at all

 

[jaguarskx]

You'll be fine. A stock 8600GTS uses 47w under full load. Your overclocked 8600GT shouldn't consume more than that. 47w/12v = 3.92 amps.

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I really, really doubt an overclocked E2140 will draw more power than the E6400 at full load which is 63w. That works out to 63w/12v = 5.25 amps.

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Each 7200RPM hard drive and optical drive should not draw more than 1.3 amps of power under load.

Since the Earth watts 430 has 30 amps on the 12v rails, you shouldn't have any problems.

Other things like motherboard, RAM, any PCI card like a sound card, will draw power from the 3.3v/5v rails.

Oh yeah, fans also draw power from the 12v rail. A large 120mm fan draws about 0.5 amps. Smaller ones will draw less.

 

[p3matty]

Yeah, I'm not so worried about the power requirements now, as I'm sure the PSU will fully handle anything I'm throwing at in with the initial build. Just hoping to make a system now that I can simply upgrade in 2 years with ONLY a quad processor and maybe a new video card. Will I be able to upgrade those 2 components without needing to get a new PSU? Also, should their prices come down greatly, might also get a Blu-Ray and/or HD DVD drive, but they shouldn't draw that much more power than a DVD+-R/W drive, right?

Thanks again for the input. Putting the parts together now as different components come on sale. Has anyone found an e-tailer in the states selling the P35-DS3R rev. 2.0 yet? The website has it, but I can't find it anywhere to order from. As far as I can see, they drop the serial and parallel ports for more USB ports, which is a good thing. As long as it's the same price, that's the board for me......

 

[delluser1]

Yeah, I'm not so worried about the power requirements now, as I'm sure the PSU will fully handle anything I'm throwing at in with the initial build. Just hoping to make a system now that I can simply upgrade in 2 years with ONLY a quad processor and maybe a new video card. Will I be able to upgrade those 2 components without needing to get a new PSU? Also, should their prices come down greatly, might also get a Blu-Ray and/or HD DVD drive, but they shouldn't draw that much more power than a DVD+-R/W drive, right?

Thanks again for the input. Putting the parts together now as different components come on sale. Has anyone found an e-tailer in the states selling the P35-DS3R rev. 2.0 yet? The website has it, but I can't find it anywhere to order from. As far as I can see, they drop the serial and parallel ports for more USB ports, which is a good thing. As long as it's the same price, that's the board for me......

Read this http://www.overclockers.com/articles1452/

 

[sailer]

Yeah, I'm not so worried about the power requirements now, as I'm sure the PSU will fully handle anything I'm throwing at in with the initial build. Just hoping to make a system now that I can simply upgrade in 2 years with ONLY a quad processor and maybe a new video card. Will I be able to upgrade those 2 components without needing to get a new PSU?

Ok, my 2 cents worth. If the 500wt PSU is only $20 more get it. The 430wt PSU is fine for what you have at present, but if you're looking to future upgrades in the CPU and video card, it might not handle them. For myself, I'd rather spend the extra $20 now and not have to spend more money later if a larger PSU is then needed. Also, capacitators age and the power decreases over time. Further, some of the newer CPUs and video cards are using less power, but others are using a lot more. What things will be like next year is anybody's guess. As I say, just my 2 cents worth.