i was thinking of replacing my Enermax 470watt with the Mushkin 580Watt that OCC reviewed a few months ago. i always like Mushkin Ram so is the PSu just as good?

or does people have a better recommendation? under $100 that can hold a 8800 on load and future cards

The Mushkin XP650 that we reviewed runs my water cooled box with a 6750 and 2 640mb 8800gts cards,4gb of ram as well as the rest of the system just fine.

I think that'll be a great PSU. Depending on how much you want to shell out, you could go for the 650W, but the 580W should be fine

For the price that looks like a pretty strong PSU. If you plan to keep the PSU through a couple upgrades then I would recommend going with the 650W version even though it is a little more expensive.

i ordered the 580watt this should be good for the new intel x38 boards because it has the 8pin connector

Do you think it would power this?

^--The link goes to my newegg wish list. That's my planned build as of now. Add to that my two 36GB raptors and a 200GB IDE drive. Also possibly upping those specs to 4GB of RAM, but not sure.

Newegg's psu calculator shows over 750W...I'm sure they pad those numbers, but 750W was what I originally expected going into this build. I don't want to cut corners, but if 650W will be fine and this is stable, $130 for a PSU is pretty good.

Thanks.

That 650w mushkin power supply will definitely be able to handle all of that. Heck, were it not for my lack of molex/sata connectors, my 450w unit could handle that without a problem.

if each 8800 takes 220 watts on load and 90watts for the cpu maybe another 75 for 2 hdd and a cd drive thats more than 450.

220
220
90
75
= 605 on load , so i duno about that 450.

That's if 8800GTS's actually pulled 220w under load. I believe the max an 8800GTS(320/640) will pull is 120w. I remember hardnrg posting an exact number but I don't remember what it was exactly. I do remember that it was WELL UNDER 200w, though. So yeah, I could totally take on one, possibly two but that would be pushing it.

Okay, well that makes me feel slightly better...especially if ikillsteal is right about the 8800GTS's taking less than 220W apiece. I will have more than 2 hard drives though (2 10k raptors in raid-0 + 1 sata 3.0 + 1 ide), but the odds of everything being full load would be really slim anyways.

Ask ccokeman about it, he's running dual 8800GTS 640MB's on that PSU

each drive takes 25watts thats for standard for all HDD and cd/dvd drives

At startup, maybe. Once those drives actually get working(read/write/seek) they pull considerably less. Check this page out for a ton of numbers and figures relating to that.

I know, he was the one that posted about it in this thread . But I just wasn't sure how much more a quad core would pull.

I have not crashed in benchs or games yet. So it should do fine.

heehee, okay