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It's crucial to purchase a power supply that matches or somewhat exceeds the power needs of your PC. Each component requires a certain amount of power. Using the chart at right, add up the power requirements of your PC's components, and then add another 30 percent for "wiggle room." Most systems will do fine with a 250- or 300-watt supply; there's no advantage in purchasing a supply with considerably more capacity than your system needs.
Please remember to take into consideration any USB devices you might be attaching to your system.

COMPONENT
TYPICAL WATTAGE
Processors 
Celeron 700 MHz Chip21
1 GHz Pentium III Chip33
1.7Gig Pentium IV chip65
1.4 GHz Athlon chip70
SECONDARY STORAGE 
IDE Hard Drive 15
Floppy drive5
ZIP drives 10
CD ROM10-25
CD R/RW - DVD10-25
Tape drive50
Standard SCSI Hard Drive10-25
10K or 15K rpm SCSI H-Drive10-45
OTHER 
Motherboard 15-30
Average PCI card (NIC etc) 5
Memory10 per 128MB
Graphics Card 20-50
Modem10
Sound Card 10

Reference

[note: Edited by Awgeewhiz, Source by Jtmo]


Feedback received on this FAQ entry:
  • Today's power supplies use the term "Watts" as advertisement rather than fact. And, power quality goes down the closer it gets to max. So we'd start with at least a 50% margin for headroom. And, even then it is necessary to read the reviews to find a good power supply.

    2020-05-07 05:30:54 (danielwrites See Profile)



Expand got feedback?

by Awgeewhiz See Profile edited by dbmaven See Profile
last modified: 2003-09-05 11:09:54