Will my 300 watt power supply run ok without bottlenecking my system? -EPoX nvidia2 chipset mother board(200/266/333) -512ram pc2700 -athlon XP 2700 (plan to overclock, too) -geforce4 4400 4xAGP 128mb -SB audigy card -hard drive, floppy drive -two CD/CD-R drives -3 case fans

You're on the edge. Go here and see for yourself. You know more about your machine than we do. http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/ Remember, everything won't be running at once. Skip

You have more than enough power with 300 watts! You could put 2 more 7200 rpm hard drives in the system the ATX board will divvy up the power as needes.

Depends on the power supply I'd say. I also have a 300W psu that should be much too small for my Athlon TBird, 5 harddrives and 3 oprical drives but it works fine now for over 3 years! If you already have the 300W psu try it but if you run into problems like sudden reboot or shutdown get a newer one soon (I suggest 400-450W in case you add new hardware later). I had trouble with a 200W psu on my old system and after a cpu upgrade it blew up after a couple of weeks and killed the controller card of my old scanner because I ignored the little problems who indicated that something might be wrong!

I agree, try it and see seems to be the best approach for AMD systems. Some will run fine and some will simply not. Others will run fine for a time and then suddenly get "squirrelly" as one I just repaired did. His brother built it and for three weeks it was no problem and then suddenly would not remain running for more than a min or two. I underclocked it to below rated speed (133 back to 100) and it runs fine all day. I dunno why this is but apparently it just is. Jimi_l

Power ratings are a marketing ploy..and usually mean short bursts up to the amount instead of continuous power out at 300 watts..same thing with stereo equipment..with 80W cheapo speakers expect only 50-60W continuous power..any more and you get a lot of distortion..same thing applies with computer power supplies minus distortion..you'll simply overload the supply and it'll crap out.