Quick question. What wattage PSU??

PSUs: The source of DC power for all components in the PC & often a big noise source.

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donmateo
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Oct 01, 2005 8:37 am

Quick question. What wattage PSU??

Post by donmateo » Sat Oct 01, 2005 4:05 pm

Hey, great site! Wish I found it a long time ago. Quick question.

My Rig:

Antec P-180
Asus A8N-E
AMD X2 4400+
1GB OCZ RAM
2 74gb WD Raptors @ 10,000 RPM's
Geforce 7800GTX
DVD Burner

Should I go with the Seasonic S12-500, or will the 430 do?

Also are the Raptors loud, didn't do much noise research on them?

teejay
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Location: The Netherlands

Post by teejay » Mon Oct 03, 2005 12:01 pm

The S12-430 is enough, but the S12-500 has the right power connectors for your video card... I think you'll need a conversion cable with the 430. The Raptors are reviewed on the main site, just like the power supplies; have you read the reviews?

stromgald
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Joined: Wed Jun 09, 2004 12:45 pm
Location: California, US

Post by stromgald » Mon Oct 03, 2005 12:28 pm

430W would still be overkill unless you're going to be adding another graphics card later (SLI), which the ASUS A8N-E doesn't support. If you're going to get a converter for the graphcis card power instead of the 500W PSU, you might as well get the S12-380W. 330W would do for the setup you listed, but just incase you want to add 4 extra drives and alot of PCI cads or something you'll want 350-380W.

As far as noise goes, be careful of the Raptors, motherboard fan, and graphics card fan. The extra RPM in the Raptors doesn't add much performance in even hardcore gaming or other desktop PC apps, and is not worth the extra noise IMO. Also look into getting rid of the northbridge fan on the A8N-E and replacing it with a passive cooler. Also, what's your cooling setup? You didn't list the CPU or GPU heatsink/fan.

slipknottin
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Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2005 7:55 pm

Post by slipknottin » Tue Oct 04, 2005 11:16 am

stromgald wrote:The extra RPM in the Raptors doesn't add much performance in even hardcore gaming or other desktop PC apps, and is not worth the extra noise IMO.
Various reviews of its performance and noise seem to directly contradict your opinion. I should mention that the noise reviews are for the FDB raptors, the earlier ones were significantly noiser.

stromgald
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Joined: Wed Jun 09, 2004 12:45 pm
Location: California, US

Post by stromgald » Tue Oct 04, 2005 12:14 pm

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... =2073&p=11
Well, here's one reputable review that determined that although there's a noticeable performance boost (~5%), it was not dramatic. It also mentions that the synthetic benchmarks that were used tend overestimate the actual performance boost (i.e. in the real world of computer use, hard drive spin speed is not a driving factor in performance).

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