Need A New Psu

[snboarder113]

I've had this ocmputer i built myself for awhile now and im really sick of the crappy psu in it, it came with my rosewill case, i have amd 64 athlon 3000+, corsair 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital Hard Drive, Asus A8V mobo,sony dvd burner, Cd burner, and an ATI 9550 Radeon graphics card, i have a budget of about $100 and would like a quality power supply that isnt gonna fry anything, any suggestions?

 

[howard_hopkinso]

A psu by Enermax/Antec/Fortron are all good quality. Around 450watts should be about right.

Your budget of $100 should be more than enough.

Take a look HERE for lot`s of info about psu`s.

Also, look at this psu wattage calculator HERE

Regards Howard

 

[PUTALE]

for 100, you can buy a very good psu for yoru setup. yea, I would suggest go for good companies, such as antec, enermax, seasonics.

Get a min 450w or higher and at least 25amp on the 12v rail.

 

[snboarder113]

alright, im looking at an enermax silent series, but on a separate topic, i was wondering if I can put a Sata Raid hard drive on my Asus A8V motherboard, and what would be the advantages of that vs. an IDE hard drive

 

[DonNagual]

Yes, your motherboard does support Sata, so if you buy an Sata hard drive you'll be able to install it. But Sata is not THAT much faster than IDE really (150mb/s vs 133mb/s max theoretical transfer). For me the main advantage of SATA is the cables are much smaller (cleaner in the case) and no need for the master/slave settings. That plus SATA is just more future proof (IDE will be phased out eventually).

If you want to utilize a raid setup, you need (at least) two hard drives. A raid0 setup will speed up your system a bit. A raid1 setup would give you protection against loosing data due to a dead hard drive, but it is not very cost efficient for the average home user. You have to install two hdd, and you only get the capacity of one of them. But the advantage of raid1 is that if one hdd dies, all your data is intact.

 

[snboarder113]

Alright, so its just kind of making a copy of everything? and keeping it in tact?, i already have some nice round IDE cables that look pretty shweet if i do say so myself through my blue lit window on my case, so is it a gaming enhancement or what? i play unreal tournament 2004, counterstrike: source, and it keeps up as fast as i can go, only lag is really only server or ISP problems its an extremely fast machine with just the IDE hard drive, so i really dont understand the point of Sata?

 

[DonNagual]

Sata and Raid are two different things. It sounds as if you are mixing them together (sorry if I am misunderstanding you).

The advantage of sata over ide is speed (especially sataII as it is 300mb/s) and the fact that you can set up raid arrays using it. When you setup the hard drives in raid, you can increase your speeds even more. There are many different types of raid arrays, and each serves a different purpose.

For the home user, Raid0 really only becomes useful for CAD, multimedia editing and playback where higher transfer rates are needed. Gamers these days are also jumping on the bandwagon as well.

And then there is the security if you do a raid1 setup. If one of your hard drives dies, you loose NOTHING. Expensive (the cost of a second hard drive) but nice to not have to worry.

But the average home user probably won't notice any difference at all from using IDE or SATA. I think that is the bottom line of what you are asking, right?

 

[snboarder113]

Oh i see, "raid1" is a set up you can use or not use on sata drives to back everything up, Yep that answers my question thanx a bunch!