Looking for a better PSU

[pentium]

Well in order to upgrade my video card (or anything in my system to that matter) I need to replace my 430W Thermaltake PSU.
On top of my planned new card, my system has other power hogging luxuries like:
-18 USB 2.0 ports
-4 Firewire ports
-The Live! Drive
-A dvd drive
-Two floppy drives
-Two hard drives (130 gig Seagate and a 40 gig Maxtor)
-A panasonic Magneto-optical drive

I need something with LOTS of power but still at a good price.
Do you guys have any ideas?

[stevo1210]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Have you looked at the FSP bluestorm series? The 550W edition costs about $100AUD.... I don't know how many canadian dollars that is.... but I'd guess it be simlar in Canada.
Another PSU you could look at is the Antec Basiq 500W series. They cost about $80AUD here in Australia.

I think both of them should sufficient for your new graphics card and the accesories you have on your PC now.
If you want something more powerful, I'd suggest a Seasonic S12 600W series PSU. They are expensive, but they have good caps and also a nice finish on the outside.

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

I'll look for a bluestorm first and Antec last.
Those power supplies seem potent enough to work in my system.

[stevo1210]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Have you looked at the FSP bluestorm series? The 550W edition costs about $100AUD....

Sorry Pentium, I got this part wrong. The FSP Bluestorm is a 500W PSU. Not 550W for $100AUD.

[stevo1210]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Another PSU that you could look at is the SilverStone ST50EFP 500w series PSU. It costs $110AUD here in Australia. After looking at some internal images of this Silverstone unit, I'd have to say that is is built very well.

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Hmm.
The PSU costs the same around here and it looks pretty good but is it able to support my whole system? The video card alone is recommended to be used with a 450W PSU at the minimum.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

What kind of video card do you want to put in your system, that an 450w PSu would not be plentiful of whats?

[dood]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

When asking for power supply recommendations, you need to quote all of your system specs. If you're running that stuff on a Celeron 500mhz, your current supply is fine. If you're running it with current-gen hardware, it may be lacking.

I run my entire system on a 350 watt sparkle PSU. Specs are:

AthlonXP 2200+
2x 512mb DDR400 RAM
1x Seagate 250gb SATA main drive
1x Maxtor 200gb IDE backup drive
GeForce 6600GT (requires one 4 pin molex connector)
Standard Lite-on IDE optical
Adaptec SATA RAID PCI card
Front and rear case fans

Never had a lick of trouble, even with overclocking and gaming. Plenty of power to spare.

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

What kind of video card do you want to put in your system, that an 450w PSu would not be plentiful of whats?

This Card.

Athlon 3000+
1x 256mb DDR400 RAM
1x Seagate 130gb ATA main drive
1x Maxtor 40gb IDE backup drive
ATI Radeon 9600XT
Standard Creative IDE optical DVD
Adaptec SCSI PCI card
Front and rear case fans

I didn't go with the normal specs as my peripherals (mostly the USB) suck up quite a bit of juice.

[dood]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

If you're worrying about performance, my recommendation would be to upgrade the memory before you worry about the video card.

[shadow]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Popping in a gig of memory will not cost much (nowadays) and performance will be much much better. 256mb is not considered much now with more modern games. Windows will also behave much better and it wont be swapping data to the hard disk all the time. I presume that you are planning to play games on this system considering you want a fairly powerful graphics card.

Ideally you would upgrade both the graphics card and memory at the same time.

[gdement]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Newegg has a 700W Hipro for $100, and lots of FSP's including a 500W for $78. The bigger FSP's seem to get very expensive though.
I've been happy with both of those brands in the past, but haven't had any experience with the bigger units in question.
The comments on the Hipro say it's very large, so you need lots of room in the upper part of your case.

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

That's my temporary stick of ram.
I let a friend borrow my two gigs and a week later he returns them to me saying that they didn't work with his DDR2 ram (that's right, they were fried. )

The comments on the Hipro say it's very large, so you need lots of room in the upper part of your case.

I think I have room.

[shadow]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

That's my temporary stick of ram.
I let a friend borrow my two gigs and a week later he returns them to me saying that they didn't work with his DDR2 ram (that's right, they were fried. )

What a bum!!
So he basically forced your RAM into his system even thou the notch is in a different location and it does not want to go in. He obviously did not realise that DDR2 memory has around 2x the amount of pins as normal DDR memory as well.

In short I would be very pissed off.

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

In short I would be very pissed off.
:rambo:

Oh I am pissed off and he knows it as he has been avoiding me ever since I phoned him. He knows that I want to kill, gut, quarter and sell him to pay back for the ram he killed.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

This card is really somehow power hungry

The GFX chip and rest of the card are using about 135w in 3D mode, the included TEC will use additional 75w (is this really needed or only a gimmick?).

The TEC is exclusively powered from the 12v rail, which would translate into 6.25A.
If we assume the 135v would feed exclusively from the 12v rail too, then this would translate into additional 11,35A.
Combined together it would be a healthy ~16.5A load at the 12v rail in worst case.
But may be, the card is using the AGP port at it`s limit, wich would be AFAIR ~70w to 80w.
Then the card would only draw 5.41A from the 12v rail.

To be on the safe side, i would use an 12v regulated PSU with about 26A at the 12v rail.
This would equal to 320w@12v with CPU, HDD`s and DVD.
A solid ~400w psu should fit your needs, but you need at least 17A per rail and two PCI-E plugs.
The be quiet Straight Power 450W would fit your needs, other PSu`s may have only one PCi-E plug or limited power per rail (if it is really limited..).

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

The drive connectors on he card are what help reduce the stress on the AGP port.
Cards like these were desighed for PCI express but have a bridge installed so you can run them on AGP with a minimum performance loss however it means that the card will require another way to get power since the AGP port can't handle it so instead of pulling a 3DFX (what was he name of that four GPU card they made that had the external power supply?) they just made it so you can hook a regular drive power connector to the card.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Yep, that`s right, but you can`t know, if they use the AGP ports maximum power capability or if they are completely switched to the 12v feeding.

You need two PCI-E 6pin plugs to feed this puppy. One is for the TEC supply, the other is for the card.

At the time of 3dfx i was a good idea to use a external PSU, as the ATX ones from that time where in most cases not capable in deliver any clean voltage.

[dood]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Voodoo 5 6000 FTW!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5_6000

[pentium]

Re: Looking for a better PSU

Yeah, That was the card I was thinking about.
By the way, I don't think they fully used the voltage output from the AGP port. I think they left a little room.