If you decide on spending some money this Christmas and build your own computer you might want to check out Newegg's online power supply calculator. Just been talking to a friend of mine who spent a whopping 800 euro's on putting together a pc workstation that would put a small dent into a mac pro. With a quad core processor, 4 gigs of ram, 2 Dvd writers and an Nvidea 8800 card his machine is a pretty powerful peace of hardware. The only issue ? It keeps stalling on him. Every now and then the whole system just fails and reboots. Initial suspicions went out to the operating system installed.. But then he told me he had a 500 watt power supply and if that could be the culprit. I thought 500 watts was a lot for a PSU … Until we entered his hardware into the calculator and found him 160 watts short of the amount of juice his machine required. Sure .. the store had said it would 'be enough' but hey :) Looks like the store was wrong !

The ONLINE power supply Calculator.