Driftster
Because A: keiren... a 500-700 watt power supply doesn't cost alot, and it'll allow for future changes without buying eve more parts.
Until recently I was running my PC - an Athlon64 with a 6600GT graphics card, DVD burner and 2 hard drives - off a 330W power supply. Granted it's not a top end system, but it ran like clockwork with a couple of hundred watts under the
minimum you're recommending. I only replaced the PSU because the old one was about 4 years old and I was worried about it kicking the bucket because of old age and frying things like the mobo or hard driver on my system.
If you find one of those online wattage calculators for PC PSUs, you'll find that even if you dump a couple of 7800 graphics cards, a couple of hard drives, a top end CPU, etc., typically you'll find that if everything on your PC is running at max power simultaneously, you'll max out at well below 500W. And that's only the theoretical max power consumption of your PC - how often do you have your GPU, CPU, several hard drives, DVD burner, etc. running at max capacity simultaneously? I just don't see the advantage of adding several hundred extra watts of power to a PC that really doesn't need it. I don't see anything like 700W being required for PCs for a few years to come, considering that the current top end systems typically top out at well below 500W.
edit: I'd also be wary of very highly rated PSUs because they're likely to be cheap ones that are trying to impress with wattage. Either that or they're expensive ones designed for severs. You're likely to get either a crap one or an overly expensive one. I may have to concede this point though - I'm not really knowledgable on PSUs.
1kW is overkill.. 700W..Not so much...
Servers with RAID arrays and multiple CPUs run 700W+ power supplies. 700W is definitely overkill for a desktop PC.
and remember, he wants to game, so chances are he'll have one game in prefferece he's playing at any given time.. meaning it's gonna be tedious to take the game in and out every time he wants to do/view/burn something else...
I regularly game and burn and backup stuff to CD and DVD and I can't say that it's that much hassle to pop open my optical drive from time to time to remove my Half Life 2 disc or whatever in order to insert a blank disc to burn something. How lazy does someone have to be to get an extra disc drive specifically to avoid having to remove game discs from their drive when they wish to burn discs? You're going to have to open a disc drive and insert a disc anyway, can removing the existing disc and reinserting it later really justify an extra drive to avoid it?
and why would you tell him it's useless and then turn around and say how cheap they are?
Because buying an extra CD burner is a waste of money unless he needs it. Budgeting for a PC, like anything, is about deciding what you need and how much you're willing to pay for it. The extra $20-$40 for a second burner could be used on something else like a USB key drive, a higher capacity hard drive, etc. In my case, a second CD drive would sit there doing exactly nothing because I've never (or at least I can't remember tha last time I did it) any cause to directly copy CDs. That's why I said that
unless he needs CD to CD copying it would be a waste of money. If he needs to regularly copy CDs directly, then it wouldn't be a waste of money.
then in the event he wants to copy a CD..he can without making a image backup or doing track for track on an audio cd
Yes he can do that. But an awful lot of people don't actually need or require CD to CD copying, like myself. Just about every single thing I burn to CD or DVD is coming from my hard driver and not another CD. I only ever burn off CDs so that I can make compilation CDs in which case the extra CD drive is a waste because I'm going to compiling my CDs from files on my hard drive that I've previously ripped from various CDs. Of course, YMMV, but I'm just thinking of the typical case where a second CD drive would just sit there unused.
Copying from CDs and then burning the resulting image is that fast these days (less than 10 minutes in total) that if it's done only rarely then the second drive would just be an extra device in your PC that sat there pretty much wasting space.
But seriously, I don't want to spend a bunch of posts defending the purcahse of only a single optical drive. I just think it's a waste of money for
most people/. If he thinks it's worth his cash and wants disc to disc copying, he can go ahead and order a second optical drive. I'm just saying it's not necessarily a good idea.
KM.
