Will my 300watt Power Supply Handle this setup?

[winstonp]

I recently purchased a dell 531 inspiron desktop w/ a 300w power supply. I am curious if it can hand the power consumption requirements of the following setup. The video card is my area of concern. If it is a problem, will doing things like removing the modem, etc... help?

3800x X2 AMD 64
2GB Ram PC5300
160GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
DVD Burner
external 500gb USB hard drive
wireless mouse
eithernet hooked up
512mb x1950 pro******

[mjc]

Looking around a little...

450-Watt power supply or greater, 30 Amps on 12 volt rail recommended (assumes fully loaded system)

That is what is coming up for many brands of that card, so I'd say no, your standard Dell power supply won't cut it. And removing piddling little things like the modem won't help matters, either...there just isn't enough to the power supply to begin with to make it work.

That is one of the problems with off the shelf systems...even if they open slots to expand with, they often don't have a powerful enough power supply to actually pull it off.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

It's not how much RAM you have, it's how many sticks. Wireless mouse uses batteries so that's not an issue. Does the external HDD have it's own power supply and not rely on the usb power?

I had an older system with an AMD Duron 850 that worked fine with a 300W PSU. But it had onboard sound and video with weak performance specs.

Processor
micro ATX mobo
2 sticks of pc133 RAM
internal dial-up modem
pci SCSI card for scanner
2 ide hard drives
2 optical drives
ethernet card
onboard sound
onboard video sometimes with an added pci video card for dual monitors
usb 1.1 ports barely used
parallel printer on lpt1

Lasted for years this way but what went south first? The power supply! :eek: Can't imagine why?!?! ;)