Hi All, Do you think that a 300w power supply will hapilly work for the following? - p4 3ghz processor 160gb hdd + 20gb hdd sony dvd burner agp graphics wireless network card ect... Thanks. Slickblueman

Hey Slick, I recon you should go a little higher. Say around 400W. 300 is rather close to the minimum that will run a P4. You obviously want a damn good system, don't skimp on the juice. You'll regret that later. If not sooner. How'd d'ya go with the case? You never got back on that.

You are right Rimfire, i would go higher, but to about a 450w, to 480w. The p4 is not what you have to worry about, consuming about 65w at most, the main thing you have to worry about is your vid card. That take up a lot of power. A lot of today's vid's specs call for 300w or 350w PSU. So as you can see, 300w vid plus a 65w p4 eqauls 365w, plus all your hardware, so 400w prob would be suffiecient, but i would go higher for future expansion. You can be amused by the simplest of things. The smartest people in the world, over-look the smallest objects. War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/power_supply/ Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

My rig runs perfectly on a 250w supply: AMD AthlonXP 2800 2 Hard drives 2 optical drives 768mb RAM Radeon 9800 Pro (also had a GeForce fx 5900 Ultra in there with no problems). Personally I would say you'd be ok with that 300w PSU, UNLESS you are planning to buy one of the latest AGP cards (e.g. GeForce 6600/6800 or Radeon x600/x800).

@dannyboy There was a time I might have written the same. I had an 200W in a Pentium2 and upgraded it to a Celeron 733@1232MHz. Worked well for a couple of months but suddenly first the scanner stopped working (later I found that it fried a transistor on the controllercard), then my Geforce2 mx made trouble and finally an older harddisk was gone. At that point I realised that my PSU was damaged and put too much power out and slowly fried all my internal parts. There are PSU who can take a lot and there are others who will just blow up or even worse. You should keep in mind that the Pentium4 need around 100W only to produce heat and the 300W are divided between 5V, 3,3V and 12V. As example it maybe able to run a lot more drive than you have but still fail to supply enough power for the CPU! I suggest a good 400W or 450W PSU for that system and you should be on the safe side, even if you add another drive or card! Sure, what happened to me was some sort of worst case but it can be very costly!

thanks for all of the replies, the case that i am looking at is only AUD $90 and it comes with the 300w power supply, it is nothing special but i dont think that it really has to be as it is only a case. Thanks for all of your help. Slickblueman