is my power supply strong enough for pc upgrade?

[Johnny B]

hey i have a thermaltake 480W power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153007

and i want to upgrade my cpu, motherboard, and video card. the cpu is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and the motherboard is an ASUS socket 939 type and as for the video card a decent 128mb for around $50-60.

so i wanna ask u guys if ya can help me...is the 480W power supply strong enough to run a pc with the new upgrades above??????

my current pc specs are below:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
1.54GHz 512 MB Ram
Maxtor 120GB Hard Drive (8MB Cache)
Lite-On Dvd Burner 16X DVD+R/DVD-R
cheap video card from 1996
3.5 Floppy Drive
10/100 Ethernet Adapter

thanks for the help in advance and looking...have a nice day!

[saphalline]

Ooh, just barely! A little too close for comfort for me, but it should work fine. Just get it upgraded as soon as you can. And what mobo are you looking at for the upgrade? If it's a newer one (I hope so!) you also run the risk of your Thermaltake PSU not working at all with the new mobo because of the switch to ATX 3.0 (aka ATX12V 2.0). The new PSU spec requires dual +12V rails and a 24-pin main ATX power connector (compared to 20-pin for the older spec).

[Johnny B]

hey thanks for ur reply..so if i was to upgrade the power supply how many watts am i lookin for and what brand? my budget for this is under $80. thanks alot

[saphalline]

This Antec (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817103937) would be a good one. ATX 3.0 and plenty of power.

It's not so much the wattage rating as the invidual power on the rails, or voltage lines. Modern hardware puts a much higher stress on the +12V rail, whereas older hardware like your AthlonXP puts a higher stress on the +5V rail. As you can see from your current Thermaltake's specs, it provides 18A (amps) of +12V power, which is right at the bare minimum for modern systems (17-19A). The 500W Antec I linked to provides less amps on the +5V rail (30A vs 35A) but it provides 17A + 19A of +12V power. This is what your new hardware will use the most, and the latest PSU's provide twice as much power here (at least).

Confusing, I know, but like all things in the computer world you can't look at just one number to find the answer. Wattage is a good indication of how much hardware you can run off a PSU, but not what type.