what type of psu do you recommend me to get?

one that's inexpensive and still has some punch in it. rage sort of taught me all i know about power supplies.

the thing you'll want to look at for the most part is the 12v rail. there are three rails in a power supply. 3.3v, 5v, and 12v. they all add together to give you the total wattage. but all we care about is the 12v.

the reason we care about what the 12v in particular has is because your cpu and video card draw their power from that rail. so you want to have a good amount of power floating around in there to power them.

so in order to figure out what the 12v has, you have to subtract the 3.3 and 5v from the equation. but to do that, we have to convert everything to watts. everything is in volts right now.

there are two numbers we want to work with when we're converting and subtracting those two voltages.

with any given psu, it'll list the rail type, and the amperages it gets at those rails. simply click the specifications tab, and scroll down to the "Output" section.

it will generally look something like this:
Output +3.3V@20A,+5V@20A,+12V1@16A,+12V2@16A,

-12V@0.8A, +5VSB@2.0A

we only want the first two numbers there anyway. 3.3v@20Amps and 5v@20Amps. so, now we convert them to watts. watts= amps*volts.

3.3*20= 66
5*20= 100
total=166 watts.

now subtract that from the total wattage offered by the power supply. 500-166 = 334.

what that number is, is the total wattage offered by the 12v rail. now all we have to do is convert to amps. amps = watts/volts.

so it's 334 watts/ 12v == 27.83333333333333333 amps.

generally, anywhere between 22 and 25 amps is good. so look for a power supply that's roughly 60-90 dollars that has a good amperage on the 12v rail.

now you can figure out whether or not the power supply is good or not. that one i just showed you is pretty decent. but so is the one rage showed you.

here for instance is the one i'm buying.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341010

it gets around 27.6 amps for the 12v rail. and it costs about 90 bucks.

BUT be careful of which one you choose. depending on the system, you may need more than that. may want to find one that offers somewhat higher amperages to be safe.

hey i wonder if anyone is still available to help, well i got a brand new, same power supply (got it for free... so yeah) and i guess this problem hasn't been fixed. i will go with your advice you guys gave and get that ocz 650 watt psu as soon as i can. Thanks alot of again

if anyone else has any info on how to fix problem please post so

This PSU is of far better quality than the OCZ one and provides 41A on the +12V rail. Try it and let us know what happens.

btw Rage, i added you a while ago. bubble-a3roXD@hotmail.com.

Thanks alot again for your help and everyone else. I'm going to get that psu you reccomended me. Btw, after i got the new psu (same one), my computer seems to not slow down anymore, but the the +12V rail seems to still be around 12.95 and sooner or later im guessing its going to slow down again so im going to go with your advice and get that psu.

hi, i got a whole new motherboard and psu and my +12V rail is 11.93, i guess its fixed? thanks alot guys for all your help and rage!

Is it steady at that value? If it is, congratulations, you're all set. Good luck and hope to see you around!

here is my temperate and voltage thing atm

Looks okay to me.

This is a common issue.

What happens, is your computer is capable of pushing out 100fps when the textures and other game data are in your RAM.

Chances are, the game is polling your hard drive to load textures (as you look in a 360 or move to a new area with new objects in the game), which then has to push them into your RAM. Once they are in the RAM, the FPS normalizes at 100fps, but during the texture loading, it drops significantly because of how slow the hard drive is.

The simple fix is adding 1GB of ram.

I suspect if you hit Alt-Tab while gaming and inspected peak memory use in task manage for the .exe of the game that was running, you'd discover it exceeded 1GB.

You could also try turning texture quality down a notch to see if it will drop your paging file usage enough to reduce the fps drops.

It wouldn't help much methinks. He used to get a constant FPS before, so the game going to swapfile shouldn't be an issue this time around. Also, a 7200RPM HDD is fast enough for almost any game IMO. The reason I pinpointed a PSU problem is because his +12V rail was around 13V, which indicates an overloaded PSU.

Looks like his problem is fixed, per above. For the record, 7200RPM drives will diminish FPS greatly if they are used to pull textures on modern games. They are very slow and the biggest bottleneck on any gaming system. That includes 10,000RPM and 15,000RPM in RAID or otherwise. Still the slowest component. The reason most people don't realize this is because the bulk of information IS in the RAM. It's the spillover that isn't. Normally when people get terribly inconsistent frame rates you can take the case off and even listen to hear if the harddrive is seeking lots of information (grinding away) when you make certain movements (say walking through a large map and turning corners). This will only be noticeable if you are over your current RAM use, obviously.

You are correct there. You can't beat the seek time of a 10000RPM drive. But most gaming PCs nowadays have at least 1GB of RAM and most of the ones I've seen here at TS have 2GB as a standard, so times are a-changing. But I agree, more RAM would net him a stutter-free gaming experience.

may be a virus too

I think your problem might be is some unwanted routene, it may be a process call, or a access to HDD or may be a virus too? examine your pc through, via task manager to confirm that you are not cheated by some spyware or hacker tools. watch your pc's activity for sometime when it is idle,
after this you can come to a conclusion.

haha i know its been a while, but thanks guy, i guess my problem was my psu

i got a new one and its fine now but not the best in terms of when i first built this computer

i was just wondering, do any of you guys have tips of how to make your computer run faster and how to keep stuff being stored in hard drive instead of ram instead of memory getting jammed into my ram since i only have a 1gb ram and maybe i may upgrade

also, i may upgrade graphic cards, cheap and decent ones, and if you don't remember, mine was ati radeon x1600