graphics card and P.S.U. help ?

I would say get the Q6600 if you're going to overclock. The 45nm quad cores have been known to catch on fire or just stop working all together if you mess up with the voltage. If you're going to stay at stock speed, get the Q9300. Also, the PSU should be around 550W to be safer, as games will take extra watts to play. The bigger the PSU, the less stress on your PSU, which will let your PSU last longer.

Well, what 500 watt? I've seen some that put out 600 watts then shut down without event, and some that put out 200 bfore blowing the secondary and killing the PC. If you have a decent one that centers the power on the 12v rail, a 500w unit should suffice for a quad and a 9800GTX. Doesn't need to be great, but just don't try this with something like an Okia or Apevia- they're the reason why some people think you need 700 watts to run a nice video card! If you find you need a better unit, the FSP-built OCZ StealthXStreams are ofen marked down to just about $40 after the MIR- send it in within 14 days of purchase, and they'll honor it religiously.

How Much Power Do I Need?

Obviously, we do not expect everyone to have all the terms of art down pat when it comes to power supplies. How much power is necessary for the “average” PC system, if there is such a thing nowadays?

Take a look at what you’ve had in the past. If you bought a standard power supply from one of the top computer manufacturers, chances are you purchased a 250- to 300W power supply of average quality.

Now that is more than enough for your run-of-the-mill system consisting of a hard drive, an optical drive and a fair-to-middling graphics card.

However, if you are going to add more peripherals you need to seriously consider upgrading your power supply.

For your reference, following are details that illustrates approximately how much wattage you will need to run various common components in a PC system ( the components are on the left and the wattage required on the right):

The Motherboard: 15-30

Low-end CPU: 20-50

Midrange to high-end CPU: 40-100

RAM: about 7 per 128MB

PCI add-in card: 5

Low to midrange graphics board: 20-60

High-End graphics board: 60-100

IDE hard drive: 10-30

Optical drives: 10-25

So let's calculate a system with a powerful motherboard, a (High-end) CPU, 4 Gigs of RAM, 3 PCI cards (including the 2 (high-end) graphic cards), 2 hard drives and 2 optical drives.

That would be 30+100+224(128MB X 8 X 4 = 4Gigs @ 7 per 128MB)+15(3 X 5)+200(2 X 100)+60(2 X 30)+50(2 X 25) = 679

So compare your computer specs with the list and do your own math, you will then know what PSU you should get (NOTE: Leave yourself a bit of slack in your calculation for future hardware - Example: As calculated above, I would consider a PSU of at least 850 Watts and check prices to get up to 1000 Watts if the price difference is slight)

Hope this helps guide you

QD 1956

Depends,

I would recommend a larger PSU as you will want to upgrade in future and gaming PC's with Quad Core require a very large amount of power.

For a better idea have a look at some PC's built by companies with similar spec and have a look at the PSU.

9800? Quad core processor? Extra cards?

Dude, a 650w would be iffy.

750 watts will be better, gaming reason and gaming graphics

and other pc functions as well