Power Supply Advice

[Tunga]

Let's assume I'm building this:

Intel E6750
2GB RAM (Corsair)
8800GTS 320MB (Haven't decided on make)
MSI P35 Neo-F

Plus a few other bits, a SATA HD and a DVD RW etc, the normal stuff.

Now I'm looking at PSUs. I know about rails and buying from a good make, etc. I just want to know a ballpark figure for wattage on a PSU for that machine. I was looking at getting around 550W, that should cope with it fine, right?

[Kalos]

Call me crazy, and a little over the top, but I use this PSU: http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4L09&CategorySelectedId=11259&NavigationKey=11259,49530000 For my newly constructed desktop, which is pretty close in specifications to your own. It's held up well and the rails appear to be fairly level. I like a good margin of saftey, and it was well priced for what I was getting, so I went for it. I also had a whole boat load of peripherals to consider, with their own power demands.

Antec are a great company too. I'd recommend looking at the 600 Watt ballpark or above. 550 watts should cope fine, but it may be cutting it thin depending on other parts syphoning power, and later additional expansion.

[Tunga]

I guess so, it's just that I see a lot of 600+ ones declaring they're SLI certfied, so I'm thinking if I'm only running one card they'd be overkill.

[Kalos]

A SLI dual 6600 setup eats up less power than a single 8800 GTX. The new 8 series are power hogs, much more so than thier forefathers of SLI. While there are 600 watt PSUs baring the name SLI, I wouldn't dare run a pair of 8800's on them, it would more than likely blow out the PSU, too much weight on the 12 V rail. They're designed for two graphics cards indeed, not a single one, but in turn they were designed for far less energy demanding graphics cards. The same has happened with processors. The amount of power to run three Pentium 3s will only support a single Prescott based Pentium 4.

[Tunga]

Fair enough, I'm not too well up on the individual power requirements of specific components but that all sounds like it makes sense, cheers.

[Kalos]

The one I've just updated on the Recommended Hardware thread should do the job. As long as you only have one hard drive and one optical drive, 600 watt PSUs should do the job.

[Twoflower]

got exactly the pc you describe and a 550 wattage PSU, works fine.

[amgyn]

550 is more than enough, unless you are planning to raise the voltage and play with the video card a bit then you might want to bump to 600+w

[Tunga]

Thanks for comments, I'm not definitely building this anyway but now I have a rough idea at least.

Anyone got any experience of Hiper (PSU make)?

[Tunga]

I went with a 580 Watt Hiper in the end, they do some nice cut down one with the same actual PSU as their top spec ones but without any the modular cables or shiny lights. Since I'm trying to build something that I can leave on overnight (near my bed), the less silly flashy lights the better!

[amgyn]

i bought a psu today.. 450w.. and it was a piece of ****e .. dont get XION brand psu's :O
died in about 10 minutes.

[Tunga]

Yeah, it's always worth buying a PSU from a decent known brand. Electricty makes things explode, don't trust something cheap to protect your expensive components from it!

[Orbstu]

I would always go for a minimum of 650W when building a system