Ive recently been looking at barebones systems and have discovered that almost all come with PSU's Below 300W. Now say I was to get a barebones system and equip it with an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with a pretty good 256mb graphics card, Large and fast HDD plus a dvd RW. Not to mention multiple usb devices. Would I need to be concerened if say the PSU was 275W. I read in a link on this site that pretty much any pc out there will be fine with a 300W PSU, but I wonder how true this is. Also does anyone know if cooling is an issue with barebones systems?
Any major name brand over 430watts will be fine. Not 300. psh, N00BS! it's not the watts that matters, its the amerage it pumps out
Wait. Are you talking about the Shuttle boxes or some other SFF? The power supplies in those are designed a little differently, kinda like the rackmount server PSU's.
That might be true B, but what is not true is that "pretty much any pc out there will be fine with a 300W PSU". I don't have any stats on the subject but I'm willing to bet anything that most pcs aren't barebones.(this isn't what I'd call a risky bet)
So does anyone know just how different these barebones PSU's are? And Is it possible to use and ordinary PSU like what you would use in a desktop?
What "barebones" setups are you looking at? If it complies to the same formfactor as the desktop (in otherwords, ATX to ATX) yes. Physically, if they're the SFF's like the Shuttle ones, they'll be rather small and won't exactly line up with the standard ATX power supply mountings in standard cases.
Yeah, as I've said, those Power supplies, while ATX compliant in the power connections, aren't made for standard tower or desktop cases. You can put them in, but you'll find that you'll need to make up some what to secure it in the case. Addtionally, the power leads aren't going to be very long considering the cases they're intended for are rather small.
