hi

I'm buying Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P mobo - do you think my 500w psu will be enough or should i get a higher one?

it will go with 2 hard drives, 2gb of ram, geforce 6600 and a dvd/rw.

cheers

ash.

Depends what kind of 500w PSU it is. If its a decent one, then yes. A cheap one, then probably not

Casecom Silver 500W ATX Power Supply - 20+4pin ATX12V 4x Molex £10.99

Dun noe if is any good to be honest - seemed fine in my old setup:

AMD Athlon 64 3500
Asus A8N32-SLI

yes, thats a cheap one.

casecom can be hit or miss. i've got a 300w casecom psu that came with the case, its run fine for years. i got a 500w one for my friend & it blew in a few days, replaced it with a better quality 450w & that works fine (amd x2 'energy efficient' cpu, 1 hdd, 2gb ram, dvdrw, geforce 8600).

its worth spending a bit more for a reliable psu. the watt ratings on cheaper psus seem to mean very little.

With an 11 quid 500w PSU, youd be lucky to get 300w out of it before it melted. Buy yourself a Fortron or Antec instead

As I've said before, the PSU is the most important and always overlooked part of any system.

I have an Enermax Liberty 620 (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/106365) and a Corsair HX620 (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114941) in both my Quad core systems, and they're rock solid.

I've bought a £20 600w PSU from ebuyer for a core 2 duo 2.13ghz system that won't be doing anything but word processing, and the only reason I'd even go near that PSU is because I know it's fine (I put one in a similar build last year for a client).

Cheap PSUs should be avoided at all cost, especially if you're running anything as meaty as a quad core.

£50ish (if you can stretch that far) isn't a bad price to pay considering what could happen if you spend £12 and burn out £600+ of kit!

I run a q6600 (low power edition), 2 SATA drives, a dvd-ram, various USB stuff, sound card, wireless network, and geforce 7950GTOC off the Enermax Liberty 500W and have never had anything that would seem like a power issue.

So yeah, get one of them. But you probably can't get the 500W any more, I mean who wants 500W these days when you can get 1KW PSUs?

hi

I'm buying Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P mobo - do you think my 500w psu will be enough or should i get a higher one?

it will go with 2 hard drives, 2gb of ram, geforce 6600 and a dvd/rw.

cheers

ash.

My system spec is like your in a way and my brand new 550watts PSU died after a month. it was a EZCOOL that cost £25. I'm now running a 650watts 'SWEEX' branded that set me back £40 and works a lot better.

My EZCOOL one started to Buzz like a sex toy sending vibrations through the case, in the end it just popped and that was that.

I have used this in the past it works it out for you

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

Cheap PSUs should be avoided at all cost, especially if you're running anything as meaty as a quad core.

£50ish (if you can stretch that far) isn't a bad price to pay considering what could happen if you spend £12 and burn out £600+ of kit!

Completely agree, worst thing in world would be to have loads of kit down the drain cause you skimped on the PSU and it went nuclear :)

Casecom Silver 500W ATX Power Supply - 20+4pin ATX12V 4x Molex £10.99

Dun noe if is any good to be honest - seemed fine in my old setup:

AMD Athlon 64 3500
Asus A8N32-SLI

would only go for that if like the smell of TCP (its what a melted PSU smells like)

I agree the PSU is the most important component and you shouldnt skimp.. but regardless, why are you going quad core? do you have a specific reason or is it "just cause its quad core" - the reason I ask, is the E8400 (or indeed the Xeon 3110 (exactly the same as the E8400)) actually out performs the Q6600 on MANY tests due to the incresed cache and memory bandwidth, plus the E8400 is 'future proof' as it supports SSE4.1, where-as the Q6600 is only SSE3, oh, and the E8400 is more efficient, uses less power, runs cooler..

any ways, thats just my thoughts :) - I opted for the E8400 over the Q6600 for many reasons, as well as the ones above..

and with a geforce 6600, the Quad Core isnt going to be used really (Unless your video encoding)

£50ish (if you can stretch that far) isn't a bad price to pay considering what could happen if you spend £12 and burn out £600+ of kit!

So would £50 be the minimum you would spend?

corsair vx 550w = job done , 5 year warranty on it aswell though i'd not expect it to ever be needed

and as ghozer said , do you have any particular need for the quad? no point in getting 4 cores if you ain't gonna use them

i probably dont need a quad core, i use my pc for music prduction and gaming - but the reviews were so good and i figure its going to last me for a while so i thought why not.

out of interest ive just bought http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139797

so im fairly excited about putting it all together now!!!!! can't wait. :D

cheers for all the responses.

Buy one for about £60+ I did a thread on this subject ages ago when I was building mine... I was half tempted to try the psu that came free with the case but kept it as a spare, tried it on another pc the other day as soon as I pressed power *bang*, *bang*, *sparks* *fizzle* *loads of smoke* :| Luckily it didn't take any other components with it.

edit: Sorry didn't read the above post, glad you got a decent one!

i probably dont need a quad core, i use my pc for music prduction and gaming - but the reviews were so good and i figure its going to last me for a while so i thought why not.

out of interest ive just bought http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139797

so im fairly excited about putting it all together now!!!!! can't wait. :D

cheers for all the responses.

looks very nice & the psu should have plenty of power.

i probably dont need a quad core, i use my pc for music prduction and gaming - but the reviews were so good and i figure its going to last me for a while so i thought why not.

out of interest ive just bought http://www.ebuyer.com/product/139797

so im fairly excited about putting it all together now!!!!! can't wait. :D

cheers for all the responses.

to be brutally honest, for music production and gaming the Q6600 is overkill, im an avid gamer, and invested in an E8400 and dont regret it.. I'll go quad core eventually, once more games take advantage of it (there's litterally only a handful at the moment, and even they arent 'true/full' support)