Is my 250 Watt PS enufff???

[complovingmusclehead]

Hey guys, i have a 250 watt PS on an athlon 800 tbird. I have a 30 ggi 7200 rpm hard drive, a dvd-rom and a 12x burner, and a ati radeon 32 mb video card, a network card, and a soundblaster live sound card.

THE PROBLEM!! is that sometimes at start up, itll restart itself when it begins to load up the programs from the start menu... Sometimes, but rarely, it will just restasrt when i open up an application. Im also running on windows 2000. Is this a software problem? Or a power supply problem? Any help will do...

 

[MCS]

Usually PSU or memory. I would say PSU though.

 

[complovingmusclehead]

thansk a lot mcs, anyone else have opinions on this? i wanna get as many opinions as possible about this before i go out and dish out 30 bucks on a new PSU.

 

[madthumbs]

$30 will not get you a good psu! A 250 watt should be fine IF it is a good quality one. Believe me, my first 2 psu's were crap and I finally spent some money on a couple good ones. If you plan to add more stuff or keep your power supply a while you may want a 300-350watt, but quality is the most important thing. You want it to be stable, and safe. Unlike ones that can cause fires or fry your parts. Sparkle and Enermax seem good to me, if you can't find other highly recommended psu's.

 

[TheCorm]

AMD advise a minimum of 250w PSU on their site for the Athlons, yours isn't a 1.2ghz one and even though you are running a fair amount of hardware there it should be okay.

What power supply are you running, AMD Approved?

Corm

 

[TheCorm]

AMD advise a minimum of 250w PSU on their site for the Athlons, yours isn't a 1.2ghz one and even though you are running a fair amount of hardware there it should be okay.

What power supply are you running, AMD Approved?

Corm

 

[UN1Xnut]

The random reboot thing is usually a memory problem. Try loading the most conservative bios setting that you can and see what happens. Also make sure you are running the lastest BIOS/firmware and drivers on everything. Win2k with SP1, 4-in-1, and the VIA AGP patch.

As for the power supply, it may be it, but I doubt it. Try taking out all your cards and memory and reseat them in the mobo. Something might be loose.

I am currently running my T-bird 900 rig with 2x HDDs and cdrom/cdr all on a 145W PS with no problems. Nobody believes me, but it works great.

-nut

 

[Zach]

I'm thinking checking all those Via drivers too.. I doubt it's the PS, maybe if ytou have a couple more hard drives and an array of case fans...

 

[LXi]

Im trying to jam all of these on to my 250W

P3
Voodoo5
SB Live!
Two NICs
SCSI-2
Two hard drives
Two CD-ROMs
CD-RW

Well, you can guess the result, I strongly recommend 330W+.