Upgrading Power Supply - PSU

So you want to add a CD/DVD burner, and you want to add another hard drive to store all those new digital movies you made with your new digital camera. Oh! yea you have a new Video card and it has it's own processor, you noticed it has a fan on it, plus it has 1 GB of ram. Your little 200 watt Power Supply is going to blow a fuse - literately. It does not have enough amperage to create the 450 watts you need to power all the new components you are adding.

Back in the day, components came with a wattage rating label either on the device or the package. Since the advent of the "Green" machine these have since gone to the wayside. With out going to the manufacture and researching each component you add to you computer you can only guess at what the wattage is. One way around this is my rule of thumb - Hard drive and CD ROM's will require 25 watts each, your main board and processor will take 50 200 watts, your video card will take 25 and may go as high as 150, your sound card will take 25 and it may also go as high as 150. Each fan will take 25 watts. It is adding up. So you figure out how many devices you have, add it up and bingo, they don't make a PSU that big!! Just kidding. My main computer has a 550 watt PSU and it has not had any problems. All ways go higher, never lower. Don't forget that these newer high power consuming cards also produce heat, upgrade your cooling to compensate!

The newer Core, Core 2, and i series processors require more power, in the range of 500 to 800 watts with all the support chips on the motherboard. If your last PSU was under 500 watts consider going to at least a 700 or higher Power Supply if upgrading to a motherboard with a Core, Core 2, or i series processor so you will have to be upgrading power supply.

The other thing to consider when looking for a new PSU are the dimensions of a higher wattage PSU, make sure it will fit into the bay that the old PSU is in.