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Need suggestions on a new power supply

Fardringle

Fardringle

Diamond Member
I just purchased a new 6600GT video card to replace my ancient MX440 (as you can tell, I don't really need heavy video muscle), but it appears that my power supply cannot support the extra draw from the new video card. The system boots and appears to work fine if I ONLY have the 6600GT video card, CPU fan, and a single hard drive connected, but as soon as I connect anything else at all to the power supply, the video card artifacts badly to the point that the system POST is not even legible. My current PSU is rated at 420 watts with 22A on the 12V rail, but it's a generic POS and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is the equivalent of an Antec 200 watt. 😛

Anyway, my full system specs are as follows. I've looked at some power supply wattage calculators to try and determine how many watts I actually need, but none of them list the 6600GT and I can't find any specs online to say how many watts the card draws (it's an AGP eVGA card by the way).

Athlon XP Barton 2600+ running at 3000+ speed.
MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR+ motherboard. (onboard sound and NIC)
2 sticks of 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM.
eVGA 6600GT AGP video card.
2 IDE hard drives
1 DVD/RW+ optical drive.
1 floppy drive
PCI Firewire expansion card.
1 120MM case fan.
3 92MM case fans (including CPU fan).
2-3 USB devices at any one time, generally self powered.


Running the various calculators with a 6800GT video card in the system and assuming that the USB devices are not self powered (just to give a bit of a buffer), I get a result that says I need about 320-350 watts.

Just for reference, I put in the specs for what will actually post with my current PSU (CPU, video card, RAM, USB devices, and CPU fan) and the calculator says that this POS 420 watt I have now is only putting out about 235 watts. What a surprise. 😛


Anyway, I'm on a VERY limited budget for this PC (already used the available budget on the video card) so I need some good suggestions on a reliable PSU that will meet my system needs with a little room for expansion - likely not more than maybe another stick of ram or a second optical drive - without breaking the bank.

 
Both of those suggestions look pretty good. The "Green" model looks cool but that's an extra $37 (including shipping) that I just don't have right now. I'll take a closer look at that $40 FSP 400 watt model. It's fairly close to what the wattage calculators list for the needs of my system but I'm not planning to add much if anything else to the system so it should be adequate.

On a side note, does FSP actually make their own power supplies, or are they rebadged from a different manufacturer?
 
22A @ +12V should be plenty, but the sticker's probably lying.
Anything with a brandname of 350W-400W+ should be enough for you.
 
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