How Overloaded Is A 90W Power Supply?

[Windogg]

The company I work for has an agreement with HP to buy their computers . One of them needed a new NIC so I opened it up and what do I see, a 90W power supply. The rest of the specs:

HP Vectra
Intel P3 500 Katmai
64MB PC100 SDRAM
8.4GB Maxtor HDD
32X CD-ROM
3.5" Floppy Drive
8MB Matrox G200
ESS Maestro Audio
10/100 3Com 905C NIC
90W LiteON Power Supply

My question is whether the current power supply is adequate? It seems way overloaded to me. I know for a fact that it overheats very easily. The heatsink is very small and 30 minutes of RC5 is enough to cause a lockup. I also suspect that they are causing a lot of the random lockups. Opinions?

Windogg

 

[Jonny]

Thats halarious, and to think people are wondering if a 250watt power supply is good enough.

By reading what you just said Windogg, I think you already know you have to replace it don't you? But, I myself don't know squat about how a powersupply effects the computer, so I cannot give you any advice.

So, your company bought unstable computers from HP? Why don't you just return them?

 

[Sir Fredrick]

If it overheats that easily, it probably ought to have an extra fan or two in there, and I doubt that PS could handle that, so you might as well get a new PS and a couple case fans for it (unless the PS is one of those stupid ones which doesn't exhaust out, in which case just replace the PS)

 

[arthurb1]

And it's even a LiteON power supply, not the greatest in my opinion...maybe talk with HP about it? Your company shouldn't have to pay to fix that, that was HP's fault. Probably won't get anywhere, but worth a try.

 

[RSI]

90 watts?? WTF???? LMAO!!

My P83 has 150w power supply, my old old old 486 AT case (which houses the VA-503+ and K6-2, etc etc etc) has a 230 watt PS!

90 watts for that setup? That's ridiculous!!

 

[MWink]

90Watts!?!? WOW! I had a P75 that could not run off a 200Watt.

 

[LocutusX]

I guess that's not an E-Vectra then. HP recently came out with the E-Vectra, which actually only uses a 60watt powersupply, but is actually nothing more than the components of a notebook in a slightly larger case (about the size of a terayon cable modem, maybe slightly better).

But definitely in your case, a Katmai P3 pulls a lot of power, and there's no way 90W is enough. Maybe that system would be okay, if there was no CD-Rom or HD, and if the cpu was a low-speed Coppermine.