[PLUG] terabyte upgrade

[Robert Munro]

On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 at 12:59:32, Eric Wheeler wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 12:52 -0700, Daniel Herrington wrote:
> > 350W Antec Basiq PSU
> > MSI motherboard w/ onboard video
> > 1.2 gb ram
> > 2 300 gb Drives
> > 1 36 GB dirve
> > 1 DVD burner
> 
> Power supplies run near optimal at ~80% of specification.  Running
> them well below spec wastes lots of power and heat in switching.

I wouldn't advise you to try to make do with an undersized power supply.

Last year I had to buy a couple of power supplies because what is now my
old socket A firewall box suffered a catastrophic cascading failure that
blew up its power supply (along with the motherboard, CPU, SCSI card and
one disk drive), and I used that as an excuse to build out a new machine
in addition to fixing the old one.

Trawling the net to figure out what I needed I found a couple of reviews
and some other information.  Search and ye shall find, but the upshot is
that modern solid-state switching power supplies are most efficient near
60-65% of rated capacity, with far lower efficiency when lightly loaded,
as well as closer to full capacity.

So, you don't want to go overboard and put a big 750W extreme gaming rig
power supply in a system built with a low-TDP CPU chip and onboard video
but neither do you want to skimp on the power supply if you are building
a system with a 95W-120W processor and a power sucking PCI-e video card,
several disk drives, a DVD drive and maybe a sound and/or TV tuner card.

A high-quality power supply that's strong enough to easily handle all of
the kit you might ever put in the box is perhaps the best investment for
long-term reliability you can make when building a new system, or fixing
up an old one.  Stable, ripple-free voltages that stay up to spec count.

There's a pretty good power supply calculator here - use the 'lite' one:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp 

I ended up with an Antec 500W Basiq PSU for the old firewall box, 'cause
there was a rebate.  And I bought a 650W Antec TPIII for the new system,
which has an Athlon64 X2 5600 with an ATI HD3870 video card, a SCSI card
with two small 10K RPM drives, plus a larger SATA drive and a DVD drive.

Hope that helps,
Robert
 


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