Advie on power supply for p4 and GF2 needed

I'll describe one of my machines. It an old Celeron 300a with a GeForce 256 DDR (GeForce 1) and various other components. It has a 300watt power supply. The people offering you a 200 watt power supply with a Pentium 4 and GeForce 2 need to get their act together. Do not settle for anything less than a 300watt power supply. They are about the same price as a 200watt version. They should be willing to give you the 300watt for no extra charge.

-Raystonn


= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

It would be better to get more yes, especially if you are considering upgrades...

But i have heard that an athlon 1.4 running with 2 cd drives and 2 hard drives and geforce 3 and 10 case fans works perfectly with 300watts... so i'm not sure.. i personally think that 300 is as much as you'll ever need for a system built today.. unless you're building something really special.

A system really isn't supposed to be faulty with low power.. it's either working when it has enough or not when it doesn't. If it's faulty then it's probably the cheapness of it.

There are only 3 types of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not!

Umm...why would something work when it doesn't have enough power?

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A system does not always draw the same amount of power at all times. Power use fluctuates. If your power supply cannot handle the requirements of your system at peak usage, you can experience intermittant failures or even data corruption stemming from RAM not being refreshed properly or a hard drive not having enough power to spin at its desired rate.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

The way I understand the whole power usage concept is this:

Every device has a specific voltage for each non-ground power line and a specific percent deviation in that voltage that it can stand.

Every device will draw a specific amperage at a given moment depending on how much work it's trying to do. It will always draw all the amperage it requires.

In a DC system such as a computer, (Voltage = Wattage / Amperage). Obviously, the power supply will only provide as much wattage as components demand, so a better expression would be (Voltage <= MaxWattage / Amperage). Since the power supply can only provide limited wattage, if the amperage goes above some level, the voltage must decrease to satisfy the equation. If provided voltage drops below a component's minimum specced voltage, then the component could start to malfunction and may even damage itself. I lost an old 440LX motherboard that way when I first added my RAID controller. :frown:

As for this system here, I'd say 200W is way too slim for a P4+GF2. I'd never consider running <i>any</i> modern system on less than 250W of power unless it was an embedded system. I didn't even think they sold 200W power supplies in desktops anymore, except for the most minimal desktops imaginable.

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."

Actually, GF2s consume much less power (1/4 as much I believe) as the old GF256 cards. So he's ahead there. But the P4 does consume a lot, and if he's planning on adding another cd drive, or an extra hard drive later, he might be in trouble. A 300 Watt power supply is plenty and is definitely worth it.

Lyrics. Wasted time between solos.

Thanks for the advice people .I'm glad I didn't go ahead and buy this system now .BTW the system i from Gateway ,you would think they would know better than to use a 200watt power supply in this machine .I guess I'll just have to build the computer myself   Don;t even know where to start ...

I would suggest you buy a pc kit or complete generic system. Scan through several pages under pc windows in pricewatch until you find the configuration you like.