850 watts more than enough?

[OldDeadOne]

I will be building a quad core system piece by piece in the next few months and I probably will have a max of 2 hard drives with one video card(maybe two since the motherboard I'm getting can do two). Would a 850 watt power supply be enough or would I need more? This is going to be my second build as I"m still using my 7 year old PIII 1 ghz dually(I would love to build a skulltrail to keep my dual socket ways going....lol)

 

[MrWizard6600]

A real 850W? without a doubt. An 850W... yeah probably, lol.

Your not going to be pulling over 500W with 2 video cards and 2 hard drives.

keep in mind which chipset supports which dual-card config. Theres SLI (two Geforce cards) and Crossfire (Two Radeon cards), Most chipsets only do one, not the other. If you buy a P45 board and expect two 9800GTX's to work, your out of luck.

 

[OCC_Yoda]

....there's never a reason, ever to skimp on the psu. Just getting by is not the answer.

 

[jctazzy]

Any quality 850W power supply (Corsair, BFG, etc) will be overkill for that system... not that that's a bad thing. I've always bought the a step or two up from the power supply I figured I'd need to build a new system so I can toss in add-ons later.

I don't know what your budget is or the specs... assuming Q6600 or similar, WD SE16 640GB drive(s), HD4870 or GTX260 then a quality 650W would be more than you need, even if you dumped a second video card in to it. Add all that up and a quality 650-700W power supply would fit the bill.

Maybe one of these?

BFG 680-------------------- $95.00 after $45 savings, with additional $20MIR (ick)
Corsair CMPSU-650---- $99.00 after $60 savings, free shipping and add'l $20 MIR

Check out the systems builds in the General Hardware forum to get some ideas.