PSU Question

[NastyDwarf]

Greetings all,

I've recently built a new PC and I've been having the same problem with the same PSU. I'm using the Ultra X3 1000 watt. The first PSU was bad out the box, the second I got kept making my PC reboot (periodicly and during no special times) so I used my backup PSU which is 630w's and I had no problems. Heres my question. Am I using to much power? is there such a thing?? I'm waiting for the 3rd replacement to test it out to see if I just got a few bad apples.

Here are my specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66
Asus P5K3 Deluxe Mother board
Corsair Memory 4gigs
Asus Geforce 8800GTX Video Card
3 - Western Digital SATA 500gig HD's
OS - I'm running 3 all for testing: XP 32bit, Vista Ultimate 32bit, Vista Ultimate 64 bit (FYI: the system would reboot no matter which OS it was)

I did some research and I havent seen anything bad about the Ultra X3's so I was just putting some feelers out to see if I missed something or if I'm using excesive power.

Thanks all.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You should be able to get by with a quality 500W PSU, IMHO. Something is wrong if the 1000 watt PSU does not properly power your system.

 

[DSF]

It's possible that with a large enough power supply, you would be putting so little load on the supply that it would operate at lower than normal efficiency. However, I don't know if the load being small relative to the PSU's capacity would cause erratic behavior. At any rate, with a quad-core processor and an 8800GTX, I would think you'd have enough of a load even for a 1000W PSU to operate properly.