Athlon XP, how hefty does the power supply have to be? 3

[JasonHamari]

I'm thinking of picking up an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ along with new motherboard and RAM, to upgrade my current computer.

I have a 300W ATX power supply, and I'm wondering if that will provide enough power, especially considering a possible upgrade to a higher-powered video card (GeForce4 Ti 4200) in the near future, also.

AMD's "Recommended Power Supplies" on their websites lists an average of about 340W power supplies... but it also has a 250W supply on the list.

If anyone has practical experience in dealing with these power-hog processors, I'd appreciate hearing your opinions. Will 300W be enough to handle the XP 1800+ coupled with a GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card? I only have 1 IDE hard drive, and 1 IDE CD-ROM drive in the system, so I'm not concerned about having them draw too much power.

Thanks in advance,
Jason H.

 

[paparazi]

Given that you don't have multiple Hard drives or Roms a 300watt PSU will be adequate.
You could probably add a writer and a couple of PCI cards and still be OK!
The quality of this PSU is as important, is it an AMD recommended? if so I cannot see you having any problems with your present setup.
Note* nearly all generic Athlon/XP supplied cases come with 300watt PSU's.
Obviously if you do have to buy a new one go 350+ watts to give you some headroom for expansion. Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[Mulga]

Fully agree with everything Martin says... I have a client with an XP1800, 2 7200 RPM HDDs, CD writer and DVD. It also supplies power to a USB scanner and it is fine with a 300W PSU. However it has only a fairly basic AGP card with no fan and there are no case fans. It also uses onboard audio. All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

 

[lgebhart]

We have a Athlon 1800XP with a 350 watt power supply running a ati radeon 8500 64mb video card/tv running on the pc, dsl connection, dvd writer, cdrw, cdrom, 60gb hard drive, 1GB DDR ram and floppy drive with no problems so you should have no problems with the 300 watt running what you have. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[JasonHamari]

Thanks for the comments, folks, I really appreciate it!

Jason H.