Question about new Power Supply

[Hunain]

Hello folks, I have a question about a new power supply, this is my setup:

C2D e6300 OC'd to 3.0Ghz
ASUS P5k-Vm Mobo
2 X 1GB Kingston 667 Ram sticks Oc'd to 856Mhz
160GB Seagate SATA drive
40GB Seagate IDE HDD
ASUS 1608 DVD-RW
Geforce 7600GT Oc'd
ASUS Silent Knight cooler
4 x 90mm Casing fans

Right now I have a 400W PSU, first of all, is this adequate?
Secondly, If I get an ASUS 550W PSU (£55), Will I be able to throw in an 8800GT 512Mb? and Perhaps another SATA HDD and another optical drive? The 750W and 1000W PSU's are pretty expensive, thats why im thinking about this 550W one, so please advise me as to its limits and future expansion capabilities.

[staffsMike]

400W is enough for your current PC but from "my system" you are running a generic 400W which I would not advise using at all really but certainly not for a system you are pushing fairly hard.

As for you're propsed system 450w would be ample. Something like the corsair 450VX would be fine. I personally would get the corsair 520w HX which will run anything you can throw at it at the moment other than SLi GTX's etc..

[Jay]

get yourself a nice Tagan 450W it will do you no problems and ditch that generic PSU, they are more trouble than they are worth!

[Hunain]

mhmm, okay, my main concern is the graphics card, I will mainly be gaming on either a 15 inch LCD or 17 inch, for these resolutions, should I get an 8800GT 512 or 256? Plus just another question, what power supply does a water cooled system need? and when would one need water cooling?

[staffsMike]

you need it if you are doing very big overclocks. You may use it for a silent PC but this can be tricky with pump noises etc.. I've never done any watercooling so I don't know how much extra power you would need, not much I would suppose.

If you have to ask whether you need it or not though, i'm guessing you don't

Big HSF's give good overclocking potential and silent builds are probably easier with air cooling than water so i've never found the need to do it myself.

With regard to the graphics card. You don't strictly need 8800GT at all for those resolutions. There are some deals on amazon at the moment for the 512mb at £116.

If you think about going for the 256mb version I would deffiantly reconsider and go for the Ati HD3850pro which is better value for money as well as being cooler and quieter running etc..

[Hunain]

At the moment ive got a 7600GT, OC'd, the only game to bring it down is Crysis, I do ask myself, is getting an 8800GT worth playing Crysis for 10 hours? Anyways, Ive never had an ATi card and ive seen Nvidia crush them in benchmarks so I dont really go towards them..

As for water cooling, I saw a setup from Coolermaster when I went to buy the ASUS silent knight, it costed around £18 more, I was having second thoughts, but then the guy told me Id need a 600 something PSU atleast, I quickly put the package away and got the ASUS silent knight.

Btw, Ive hardly seen anyone with an ASUS silent knight, though in reviews, it beats all Zalman and the Ninja coolers..wonder why.

[Pob255]

Not sure what reviews you've been reading
Xbit's review of the Silent Knight (rev1)

So, in the closed system case the ASUS Silent Knight equals the performance of the Scythe Infinity (in its standard configuration) and of the Zalman CNPS9700 LED at 1850rpm. But I should confess the Silent Knight is a little louder than the Zalman and considerably louder than the Scythe Infinity under such conditions. Anyway, the new cooler from ASUS performs well in a closed computer.

The 2nd revision seems slightly better, all told it seems to perform around the level os the Zalman 9700 and for the same price (around £35-40) which seems to be the main problem.
Simply put you can get better for less, although there's really not that much differnce between top end coolers temp wise, so cost and sound levels become more of a aiming point.

If you have a Silent knight stick with it as it's not a bad cooler.
If you're buying a cooler to replace the stock one, then the slient knight comes lower down the list simply because of the cost and dB

[Hunain]

Yes but noise is not a big issue, if you turn down the fan performance mode to silent, it is pretty much silent but I keep it on full load, it keeps my C2D overlclocked to 3.0Ghz at 30-31C idle and 47-48C under full load. Plus it looks very nice, adds to the bling bling.