Insufficient power supplies

[AiponGkooja]

By insufficient I mean either watts or amps. What kinds of problems can arrise from not having enough of one or the other? Or if you can find an article somewhere that covers it, that will work too. Asking because I'm still working on my 7800gtx problem. New PSU will arrive shortly, and I just want to see if it can really solve the range of problems that I seem to have (artifacts and lock-ups mostly).

 

[Furen]

The wattage on a lot of PSUs is worthless because the numbers are inflated by making the less-used rails (like the 3.3v or 5v) able to handle higher loads while leaving 12v (the most important at the moment) very underpowered. Depending on which rail is underpowered you can experience random restarts, freezes, device failures, harddrive corruption, video corruption... basically ANYTHING that can go wrong may go wrong if your PSU isnt good enough.

An example of a bad PSU: a PowMax 550W PSU -- +3.3V@28A, +5@40A, +12V@20A this PSU should be something like a 350W unit, tops, but since wattage sells the +5v got inflated. You have to look at the loads each rail can take My Antec TP2 380W PSU has 12v@16Ax2, which effectively allows up to 380W of 12v power)