Is this enough power?

I was wondering if a 400w Fortron Blue Storm is enough for overclocking this system along with powering a MCP655:

A64 3000+ Venice
DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra
G Skill 4400 TCCD
x800pro

along with a hard drive, dvd burner and 4 fans

You will need more (450+ w/ stabile voltages) to make that happen.

So the 500w Blue storm would be a better bet than?

I have no experience with it myself, do a search to find out.

the AX500-A should do the job nicely.

xb1az3x said:

I was wondering if a 400w Fortron Blue Storm is enough for overclocking this system along with powering a MCP655:

A64 3000+ Venice
DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra
G Skill 4400 TCCD
x800pro

along with a hard drive, dvd burner and 4 fans

Click to expand...

It's enough, but the AX500-A is a better value.

Thanks for the replies i think ill go order one of the 500 theyre on sale at ewiz

while highly overclocked, your system will draw about 180 watts (cpu=50, gpu=70, pump=25, mobo+ram=35). maximum possible draw, say multiple drive copies and cd burning while priming and running 3dmark, could be 210 or so. here are some power draw measurements from actual systems for comparison.

you'll be fine, but the ax500-a will have better resale value and will better support a prescott should you decide to side-grade later on.

Go to overclocking, and it will be apparent that estimates of the power draw don't paint much a picture. The AX500-A is much better suited to OC'ing anything that derives Vcore from the 12V line, even a good Northwood OC can give the 400W model trouble.

true, but intel and amd overclocking create massively different psu requirements - 90nm amd chips rarely draw more than 50 watts, even at 2.7ghz / 1.6v and above. for intel, even a stock celeron 2400 doesn't fit into a 50 watt envelope. psu recommendations for amd and intel are very different problems.

in my eyes a psu that fails to supply the rated current is defective, however that viewpoint makes 90% of psus on the market defective. you get what you pay for, and market pressures have made even companies as solid as fortron produce turkeys (re: "400w" blue storm choking on a very mild northwood overclock in a recent review - so much for 14a on the cpu's 12v rail). it's depressing to me that people have to purchase psus with 150% or more headroom above actual draw just to get a stable system. marketing triumphs again

That's not the issue here. The issue is, people are completely clueless and to what real power consumption looks like, numerically. I have complete faith that the 400W Blue Storm meets its rated output, but 14A just doesn't go very far these days. The AX500-A is only rated at 15, but does a whole lot better job. It does so because it exceeds its ratings more handily than does the 400W model, not that the 400W model does not perform at its advertised level.

Estimations of power draw, both at the CPU and system level, consistently error enough as to be completely useless from a decision-making standpoint. There are many reasons for this, but mainly in that the nature of an electrical load is poorly quantified by simple integer representation. Actual current consumption varies wildly with time, it does not sit a constant, easily defined level. Beyond the wild fluctuations, you have the phase properties, inductance, capacitance, and reactance to consider, along with the exact rate of change exhibited by all these.

This is one area where people need to realize the nature of the beast and stop treating this subject like they are comparing phone plans. The way you find out if a given power supply will power a given load is to hook that load to it and observe the results. There is no shortcut to experience in this regard, as eager as people are to assume there must be. An electrical engineer with proper test equipment and the actual load and supply in question can numerically quantify the situation (and the numbers look nothing like the common internet psuedo-knowledge), but this is a far more complex, time consuming, and error prone proposition than to simply try it and see how well it works.

If you have the money I would think about a 520w powerstream. Very very nice PSU's

larva said:

Estimations of power draw, both at the CPU and system level, consistently error enough as to be completely useless from a decision-making standpoint. There are many reasons for this, but mainly in that the nature of an electrical load is poorly quantified by simple integer representation. Actual current consumption varies wildly with time, it does not sit a constant, easily defined level. Beyond the wild fluctuations, you have the phase properties, inductance, capacitance, and reactance to consider, along with the exact rate of change exhibited by all these.

Click to expand...

i don't see how phase, inductance, capacitance or their rate of change affect a load like a motherboard which filters and transforms incoming dc power. ripple, voltage stability and transient response i can see, and there are many ways to affect them.

the idea that watt measurements are completely useless in every way seems a bit odd to me, but with so many questionable units on the market i guess headroom is the only resort around that.