Power Supply question..

[Corolla568]

I wanna know how many watts i need for my computer's power supply.

I am running these specs:

Soyo Dragon Plus! motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 1700+

512MB DDR Ram (the number "2100" is on it, i'm steadily learning but don't know what this means. maybe someone can fill me in?)

(2) Hard drives. (1) 40gig (1) 20gig

Geforce 2 MX 400 64MB DDR (but i will be switching to a 9700Pro or a GF4 soon, so i wanna be able to accomidate this change)

Sound Blaster Audigy MP3+ (all the plugs are occupied, i'm not sure how much that matters...)

56k Modem (just in case...)

1 fan to suck in air

1 fan to suck out air


How many watts do i need? I"m currently running 350watts, but sometimes it shutsdown randomly. A friend said it could be my power supply. Suggestions?

 

[djwhite]

350watts is fine for your system

 

[Landrvr]

Shutting down randomly huh? That's odd... Does it give you any "blue screen's" or anything else before it goes out?

I've got an Sparkle 350 watt power supply running a Dragon Plus+/AMD 1900+/9700pro/3 HDD's and a few other random things and mine is working just fine. Unless you have a really bad off-brand power supply I think you should be ok.

As for the 2100 number on your RAM, from what I understand it basically means that it's DDR (double data rate).

...

You could have something conflicting within your computer that could be causing these shutdowns. Do you know if everything is working properly?

 

[djwhite]

Oh, and the 2100 is the memory speed (266MHz)

 

[Corolla568]

as far as shutting down:

I get no blue screens. I have turned off the portion where it shuts down on fatal error, hoping to get a blue screen, but i get none.

One time it happened, it stated something about sysdata.xml. That was only once though. Thats what led me to believe i had a weak power supply. My friend figured it wasn't getting enough power. ::shrugs::. and just to fill ya'll in, it is a legal version of xp..i asked a question on another board and got accused of having a bad version.

and i have formatted my PC 4 times. Doesn't seem to cure.

 

[Zedric]

It could be your PSU, but not because 350W is to little. Can you monitor your voltages? Check if any of the are too low or too high.