What kind of power supply would you recommend for a desktop?

Hi everyone, I am building my own custom computer and I was wondering what power supply would fit best. Also this is my first time building a computer.

You need a LOT more information to determine the size of a power supply. For a "gaming" computer, one of the biggest power users is frequently the video card you select. There are cards which can draw several hundred watts by themselves. (there is one that requires a dedicated 420 watt supply!!!)

Add on the wattage of the motherboard, the CPU, the fans, the Hard Drive, the DVD (particularly if it is a DVD writer), the memory...

Your motherboard manual probably has some baseline specifications in it; start with those. Then look up the information on the video card you have (or are planning to buy).

I run everything from an 80 watt 'pico' sized supply on my firewall to a 250 on my core 2 quad/8GB server to a whopping 750 watts on my dual Opteron running my raid array. My game system has dual 500s.

Sorry, but you need to do your homework on this one...specially with an unknown (at this point) video card.

Have fun!

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