I am sorry if questions like this have been asked before but I didn't anything that was really relevant to my question. About 6 months ago I was looking into building/having built a new pc. I was out and about one day and stumbled across an HP m7640n media center pc for a really good price so I bought it. I know that prebuilt pcs are kinda of taboo but it is actually a pretty good machine. When buying it I knew that I was going to have to replace the video card at some point but I wasn't really prepared for was the measly 300w power supply. I have confirmed with HP that this is indeed a standard ATX power supply and that it can be replaced but they told me that the motherboard may not be able to handle anything over 300 watts. Now I know that what they are saying is that the motherboard hasn't been tested with anything over 300 watts so my question is...Does anyone forsee any real true problems with popping in a 500 watt power supply into this thing? I do not have a fully loaded system and I probably don't need 500 watts at this point but I would rather be safe than sorry. Is there a true chance that I will fry my motherboard or do you think HP is just being overly cautious. Thanks to anyone who can help me with this. Here are the motherboard stats. Motherboard description Motherboard manufacturer's name: ASUS A8M2N-LA CPU/Processor Socket: AM2 Supports AMD Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, and Sempron processors Front-side bus (FSB) 2000 MegaTransfers/second Chipset GeForce 6150 LE chipset BIOS features Award brand system BIOS Keyboard combination to used to enter BIOS: F1 Form factor Micro-ATX: 9.6 in X 9.6 in Memory Four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM sockets Supports PC 4200 (533 MHz) and PC2 5300 (667 MHz) DDR2 DIMMs Non-ECC memory only, unbuffered Maximum HP/Compaq approved memory is 4 GB* NOTE: *Actual available memory may be less Expansion slots Three PCI One PCI Express x16 graphics Video graphics Integrated Serial ATA 4 SATA connectors Each connector supports 1 serial ATA-150 disk drive Onboard audio Built-in High Definition 8 channel audio ALC888 CODEC Onboard LAN 10/100 Marvell 88EC031 Back panel I/0 Listed in physical order from left to right: One PS/2 keyboard port (purple) One PS/2 mouse port (green) One SPDIF (coaxial) out One VGA port One IEEE 1394 Four USB 2.0 One RJ-45 networking port Audio ports: o side speaker out (gray) o rear speaker out (black) o center/subwoofer (yellow orange) o line in (light blue) o line out (lime) o microphone (pink) Internal connectors * One 24-pin ATX power connector * One 4-pin ATX power connector * Two PATA connectors * Four SATA connectors * One floppy drive connector * Two 12v fan connectors for CPU fan and PC fan * One 9-pin header for power button, reset button, power LED, and HDD LED * One audio header for headphone-out and microphone-in * One audio header for line input * Two USB 2.0 connectors supporting 4 additional USB 2.0 ports * One IEEE 1394 connector
Thanks for the reply Sniper. I was kind of figuring the same thing. I didn't really understand why the motherboard couldn't handle a higher power supply. That's HP support for you I guess.
Yeah, there's no reason why you couldn't use a PSU larger than 300W, save for an oversized unit like some 800W+ units are. If you have a micro ATX case, which I think you do, then you might run into a physical limitation imposed by the case. That's your biggest consideration.
Thanks Big B. It's always good to have more opinions on the subject. My case is actually a mid size tower and the current supply that is in there is indeed a standard atx power supply (not a micro atx power supply and thankfully not some proprietary crap) so replacing it should not be an issue as far as size. Although I am thinking of transferring everything into a better case anyway. Thanks again for the help.
