Selecting a power supply

R

riley454

New Member
How do I narrow down the hundreds of PSUs available?

About to build a mid-range ATX machine with not much high-end gaming/graphics etc, but my planned graphics card suggests minimum 400+W PS. Expecting to have 1 HDD but that may increase in a couple of years, 1 DVD burner and want to leave some space to upgrade if needed.

What impact do other components have on the PS I need?

Is fan size important?

How much higher power than the video card's requirement should I buy?

How important is the amount and type of plugs?

What brands do I focus on and which should I definitely avoid?
 
Focus on corsair, antec, silverstone, seasonic, PC power and cooling, and xfx brands. Stay away from everything else, basically. Sounds like a nice 500w or 550w would do just fine. Post your entire specs just to make sure.
 
The system will be fairly basic:

i5 2500 3.3GHz, 4Gb RAM, 5450(or slightly better) GPU, 1TB HDD(possibly a 2nd smaller HDD if required) and DVD Burner. Mobo will be Z68 chipset with probably not too many expansion slots. I hope thats enough info.

I was expecting a 500-550W PSU as you suggested. Is fan size important for cooling a basic setup like this and does fan size affect noise much?

Is there a minimum amount of SATA/PCIe/IDE etc outputs I should get as well?
 
550w is enough. Any of the brands I listed will have enough connections. And I wouldn't worry about the fan size on the PSU.
 
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