Hi all, Looking at building the following for a grandparent for browsing and general tasks. AMD A4 3400, S FM1, Lynx Core, Dual Core, 2.7GHz - £41.21 Gigabyte GA-A75-D3H - £59.70 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance Blue, DDR3 PC3-14900(1866) - £44.16 128GB Crucial RealSSD M4 - £79.34 Sony AD-5280S-0B DVD+RW - £13 ATX Case - £30/35 (possibly free) 430W Corsair Builder Series CMPSU-430CXV2UK - £35.32 Total - £307.73 Will the 430W be enough or should I go bigger? Would it be worth dropping to a lower brand for the PSU such as EZ Cool to save £15? Budget is about £300.
8GB for browsing the internet? Seriously? Drop it to 4GB, and get cheaper non-Vengeance RAM as well, there's no need. Apart from that, looks fine. I'd keep the PSU as a Corsair, as you don't want to be dealing with it failing at a later date.
Used a couple of these recently (well the 550w version) for budget builds and they seem to be good. Antec Basiq 450w review They go for about £5 less than the corsair 430w one you have listed. Only £30 on scan at present but they are a pre-order.
Yes, it's more than plenty (even though the CX430 is a rebranded 380W unit). The system will likely pull around 100W on full load. No. Cheap units may fail catastrophically, and then they end up expensive.
The 430 will be plenty. Used a lot of these on budget systems and never had a single problem with them even when overloading them. Nice strong single rail
You can use this site to calculate approximate power requirements. I inputted your stuff and came to approx. 203Watts. I wouldnt go any lower than the one you have picked just to be sure.
That calculator overestimates rather grossly (to boost Thermaltake PSU sales? who knows). You can shave off a third of the result to get a more accurate value.
Not so sure about that, It estimates my rig pretty accurately, says I need a 497W PSU. I have a 500W which gives me about 100W headroom if my PC is ever fully stressed. For gaming it hits the most efficient halfway point so it should last longer.
Why go so over spec for something they are not likely to do much of anything with? Have you seen the foxconn nettops? I just got one for my parents to replace a dying athlon 64 I built in 2003. Got them an entire pc for about $170 as it only needed a stick of ram and came with an ocz vertex3 60GB in bundle deal. It's got an e-350 cpu in, which is plenty for thier light use and it fits neatly on the back of the display with a vesa mount. It scored quite a lot higher than the old athlon build across the board and it just sips power.
The build looks decent, but it does seem somewhat over speced for a system that's sole use is inter browsing and (I assume) basic general tasks such as word and using media players. Id go with a Intel Pentium or Celeron, the built in 2k graphics should be more than enough, and if you go for something like the G530 you could still have enough for something like the AMD 6450 which will do fine and will have a faster system and perhaps even cash to spare when compared to the A4. You could then also save cash by opting for a more basic motherboard that still has SATA 6GB/s and USB 3, such as http://www.scan.co.uk/products/msi-...x-pcix16-1x-pcix1-1xpci-usb30-sata6g-vga-hdmi The SSD seems a tad over-kill, but then I suppose if its their only drive its a good idea, nice and fast, yet large enough for general use. Just so long as they don't collect a large amount of video and music. Regarding the original question, yes the 430 Watt PSU will be fine, particularly as its not likely to ever be fully loaded anyway. Id stick to trust-able brands (Corsair included ofc) as PSU's really do go poof and really do take out half your system when they do. Its just not worth the savings really.
