Adequate Power Supply??

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macx

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Helping a friend with a few upgrades on a Compaq Presario
S2040WM.

It came with one 40g 5400rpm drive, and (only!) 128 Ram.

I'd like to add a 7200 rpm West Digital drive of around
80g, one 512 stick of RAM and a 92mm Antec Smart
case fan (the only fan it currently has is for the 2g AMD cpu).

They only have one small PCI fax modem dialup card.

It's got a 250 watt power supply - will that be enough?

(I didn't see ANY graphics card in it)

Thanks!
 
It's hard to say really. It depends on what else you have hooked up to that system, and more importantly, the quality of that 250w psu you have in there.

But, you can take a look at this calculator to see how much power you need:
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/index.jsp

From what you have described above, 250w will probably be enough, assuming it is a quality PSU.
 
if it is able to recognize and use a 40GB drive then it should be able to use a hard drive up to at least 137GB without a bios update.

the power supply should be ok as long as you arent trying to load up multiple hard drives, three or more optical drives and a power hungry AGP video card.
 
Really appreciate the input & info!!

Love that power calculator!
Looks like we'll have a little to spare,
even taking the higher of the available
listed 2.0 AMD Athlon CPUs and adding
a USB camera.

I just built a new unit (2.8 P4 Northwoods,
ASUS P4C800E-Del board, with a GEForce 6600GT,
2 512 sticks of DDR RAM, a CDRW, Floppy, 1 IDE
& 2 SATA drives, 92 & 120mm plus the original 80
case fans, and a 1394 & several USB external
devices (although not all working at once)
and I was VERY happy to see I had plenty
power to spare with my 450 watt PSU.

BTW - I learned a LOT about building &
configuring it, not to mention what components
to select, on this site. Steep ramp up in
my learning curve!

I now can render home video to my heart's
content for hours without dropping a frame
and the CPU hasn't gone over 41C & the board
over 30 C yet!!
BIG :approve:

Thanks to all who helped educate me!!!
 
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