Hey I only have a 300W PSU for my system. Down the road I plan to upgrade my video card to a Geforce FX 5900 Ultra that recommends at least a 350W PSU. What problems would I see if I don't have enough power?

If you start oushing your power supply to the limit you will start seeing unexplained resets, computer feezing and similar events. Whether 300W is enough is dependant on what other stuff you have installed. How many hard disk, memory, etc. Then again it depends on the quality of the power supply. A good quality 300W can be better than a cheap 350W. Not all power supplies are equal. I have a 220W power supply that started life powering a 386SX with one 20 Mb hard disk and 16Mbs of RAM. Its now powering and AMD K6-2 400 with a 3.5 Gb hard disk and 96 Mbs RAM and an AGP Video card without any problems. Thats what I call reliability. Stuart Stuart

"What problems would I see if I don't have enough power?" Too little power or unstable power is a royal pain to diagnose. You can get hard freezes or restarts and either may be repeatable or they may be random. You may be okay in safe mode but not normal mode, you may be okay underclocked but not at stock speed. Or the system may not work in any of the above modes.

Stuart is correct Just depends how many components you have running of the PSU. And a top quality 300 is 20 X better than very cheap 350. Eg cd rom cd burner fllopy agp card modem 2 x HDD 2 modules of ram 2 case fans amd 3000+ Recommended a high quality 350w to 400 pSU or simillar. Brans like THERMALTAKE ANTEC ENERMAX - PROB ONE OF THE BST MONEY CAN BUY AOPEN CODEGEN Are some of the better brand available, on of the most imortant things to look for is to make sure the PSU has enough individual molex connectors for all of the components you have, therefore you dont haveto use jumper cables. Enermax and Antec have seperate case fan specific connectors also, with inbuilt speed control which adjust the case fan speed as the temp rises. High end PSU also have Over Volt safety cut out, which protects your entire comp should the psu develop a prob or a power surge high enough to triger the safety circuit. Do some reserach. Regards Janos

Just Spend the bucks and get a Good power supply, it'll save you a big hassle or you'll probably end up with what everyone above said.

My power supply is an Antec that came with my tower. Antec is really good. It powers my Asus A7N8X mobo, 2*256MB Samsung PC3200 memory, one 40GIG WD HD, Visiontek Geforce 4 Ti4600, floppy, a DVD-ROM drive, and 52x24x52x CD-R/RW drive. it don't have any problems now but worried that it might with a new GPU. Can anyone recommend a good 400W PSU under $100?

Okay thanks.