Hey guys,
So after a rather serious lack of foresight the other day I came home to a dead computer with water pooling round the bottom (rain and wind and an open window... don't ask) and am in the process of trouble shooting and working out whether I'll be building a new PC a few months sooner than expected...
Long story short, I'm starting by buying a new PSU and will swap it out first and just see if the rest of the components are still good, but my intention is that the new PSU I purchase will carry over to the new gaming PC I intend to build sometime in the next few months in any event, so I want to make sure it will have enough juice for whatever I throw in.
My current system is a Q6600 with a Radeon 4890HD, a few terabyte hdds, 4Gb DDR2, dvdrom drive, and was previously running on a Corsair HX620.
I haven't really kept up to date with the market but I've been holding off putting together the new PC because of the latest graphics card releases and now for the new range of intel/AMD chipsets. At the moment I'm working from a rough guesstimate based on having a Radeon 6970 or something like a Geforce GTX480/570, and a Core i7 950, with 8-12Gb DDR3 ram and a few terabyte HDDs.
My question is what sort of wattage should I be looking at to ensure I've got more than enough power to cater for building an up to date gaming machine (and possibly future-proofing for any of the upcoming chipsets?) in the next few months based on these sort of specs? I'd be grateful for any recommendations for a particular PSU as well. I don't have a massive budget for absolute top of the line, but don't mind paying a little bit more for a quality PSU. The HX620 served me very well, but I'm guessing I'll want a fair bit more than HX620 to power a new gaming rig with the latest mid-high range graphics card/CPU.