ATX 230W or AT 250W?

[dimme]

What would you choose.

An AT 250W power supply or
an ATX 230W power supply ?

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Never mind the dog, beware of the owner.

[Professur]

Well, considering that you should buy the form that fits your motherboard, which do you need?

AT is old technology, so if you can use an ATX, do so. Unless you NEED 250.


Personally, I'd go for a 300W ATX.

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Scotty...I need more power

[dimme]

The thing is that I have both AT and ATX power connectors on my motherboard.
I might be getting my cousins old ATX power supply (don't know what it's rated, but I assume it's 230W, if it's more then I will of course go with the higher rated one)

I have two harddrives
one Cd-rom drive, will be accompanied by another one later. 3 90mm fans, 4 80mm fans, 4 50mm fans. A motherboard, graphics card, soundcard and networks card.
I think I can need the 250W.

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Never mind the dog, beware of the owner.

[S_Klass]

ATX has the advantage of auto shut downs. That's about the only noticable difference actually.

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-=S_Klass=- I tweak... therefore I am.

[Professur]

11 fans?? What are you building? A computer or a hovercraft?

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Scotty...I need more power

[dimme]

Thanks for your replies. I don't think that I will need auto shut down features of the ATX power supply. So I will go for the AT power supply and use the ATX as a secondary to power my hovercraft, oh sorry fans

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Never mind the dog, beware of the owner.

[grover]

Computers need a lot less power than you think. I have a 325VA UPS on my computer (works out to ~ 250W rms). On my old system, it was *just* under the limit- every time my printer cartride stepper motor kicked in, the damn overload beep came on! So, I can be pretty certain the following system draws nearly 250W in total:

250W ATX P/S feeding PII-400 PC w/CD, DVD 2 5400rpm hard drives & 2 fans.
17" Monitor
AIWA 30W Bookshelf Stereo system
Logitech Page Scanner
HP Deskjet 810C printer
Cable Modem

Seeing as the power suppply alone is rated the same as the UPS (250W), that means it obviously had enough unused potential to allow the other devices to be powered. Now, a monitor draws about 80W of power, and the printer in use about 35. I'll assume the stereo takes 20W, and the scanner and cable modem about 5W total. That means my PC itself running average windows programs only used about 110-120W out of that 250W power supply.

FYI, I only have the computer proper plugged into the UPS now. I'm planning to upgrade it to a 600VA model soon, so I can have battery back-up on the TV in the living room, hehe

[This message has been edited by grover (edited 08-30-2000).]