question about power supply size

[beverage]

How does the output wattage of a power supply affect computer performance? I opened up my (store bought) computer today to clean it out and was looking over the power supply and noticed it's only 185 watts. Seems small to me. I have an athlon 850 MHz a 45 gig hard drive, 12x CDRW, a DVD-ROM and 512 MB of RAM. Often while gaming, or running mulitple programs, my computer will restart or freeze up or do a memory dump. Could this be due to a lack of power, or something else? Any info on this would be appreciated.

 

[hcarlson]

uhh yeah, I'd invest in a better one for sure

 

[DonaldC]

For an 850mhz you should at least have 250watt. 300w would give you more head room.

 

[beverage]

I just bought a 300 Watt power supply online, i should have it in about a week. Seems like a smart thing to do regardless, but does anyone think this could help solve my random restart/freez up problems, or are the two things unrelated?

 

[DonaldC]

Originally posted by: beverage
I just bought a 300 Watt power supply online, i should have it in about a week. Seems like a smart thing to do regardless, but does anyone think this could help solve my random restart/freez up problems, or are the two things unrelated?

Yes, I had the same problem after upgrading my cpu from 500mhz to 950mhz and a new 300watt PS did the trick.