I'm interested in building my own COMPUTER and one thing I'm not too savvy on are power supplies. Essentially, I need a minimum number for my next purchase here. I intend to go above and beyond, but not so far above, or beyond for that matter, that the price becomes overly inflated.

I intend to run an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ on a ASUS M2N-SLI AM2 570 SLI MCP ATX mobo. 4gigs of DDR2 800mhz ram and a Radeon X1950 pro(512mb) PCI-E x16. Throw in two internal drives of mediocre quality, two EXTERNAL hard drives, CD/DVD rom, CD/DVD burner, USB keyboard(lighted, probably makes a slight difference), USB optical mouse, and ROUGHLY 4 120mm fans.

Could someone possibly make a list of required wattage for each item individually? Thanks for the time!i wont be able to make a list of the power consumption of each item, but i can recommend at least a 400w power supply. personally, i would go with a 500W, it gives you plenty of HEADROOM and allows room for some future add-ons. some good power supply manufacturers are corsair and OCZ.I would start at 500w and than look at how much you can spend.

Thanks for the quick responses. I was looking at getting something with a BIT more bang than a 500w regardless, but figured I'd make sure I wasn't completely overkilling with a 1000W or something on something that could run on 400W.I'd say a 1000W PSU would be overkill.  Not only purchase price, but also the cost of energy it consumes just with normal use.  I'm not a penny pincher, but you'd be surprised how fast the cost can add up.  Even  more so if you let it run most of the time. If you were thinking more than 500W then I'd meet somewhere in the middle of 500 and 1000.Seasonic is great ps supply also. Quote from: BizzaroHunter on April 01, 2008, 10:41:29 PM

Could someone possibly make a list of required wattage for each item individually? Thanks for the time!

but also the cost of energy it consumes just with normal use.