what wattage of PSU do I need?

[robbiep]

I'm building a system with a Q6600, P35 mobo, 8800gt, 4gb ddr2, one optical drive, a pair of raptors, and a 7200rpm hard drive. How beefy a PSU do I need to order?

And can anyone reccomend any good brands?

 

[MarcVenice]

Please realize that depending on what you use the HD's for, some 750gb HD's which in the end cost the same as the raptors, will be equally fast, but 5 times the size. Now that know that, any qaulity 500w PSU will do for your PC. Corsair 450/550vx, Corsair 520hx will do, Antec Earthwatts 500w will do too. The latter is the cheapest, the hx is modular which is nice, and the vx are entry level PSU's, but still high qaulity.

 

[robbiep]

As far as the raptor issue, I'm building this system for a friend who does a lot of database-type stuff with editing a fairly large DB over and over again. He thinks the raptors will work better, and I've been unable to find benchmarks disproving that. Does anyone have links to something like that?

 

[John]

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13253/1