power supply

[wjhaur]

Is there anyways to know the actual watts the power supply can support? It's by seeing it at the back of the casing?

It's 300 watts power supply enough for a athlon system with two harddisks and two cdrom?

[echo_pwd]

more than enough!

[This message has been edited by echo_pwd (edited 05-25-2001).]

[Bovon]

In my puny opinion, 300 watts is not more than enough. At best, its adiquate for a basic system. When extra fans, overclocking, extra drives may be added sometime, the voltages may begin to suffer.

In any AC/DC conversion power supply, when the DC circuits are overloaded, it can introduce an AC ripple into the DC outputs, which sensitive computer chips don't like at all.

There are many posts concerning such as this on several forums I visit. Some of the guys are adding a second ATX psu to their systems to run the fans, ect. rather than spring for a new 400 or 500 watt psu.

Different power supply manufacturers have different amp ratings for the 12, 5, and 3.3 volt rails. Where one 300 watt psu may supply 25 amps to the 5 volt rail, another make may only supply 20 amps.

If anybody ever needs to add a second ATX psu, here are a couple links with the how too's.
http://www.virtualhideout.net/guides/atx_psu_mods/index.shtml
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=113469

[MiKe85]

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/013600.html