250w help

[Steve132]

Hi there...

I am running an emachines with a p4 1.6. At a lan party the other day, however, I noticed that my machine seemed to be performing very slowly in comparison with my friend's 933 pIII. granted, he had more ram, but still.

I was talking later about hardware, and I told one of my buddies that I had a 250w power supply. He was horrified, and said something to the effect that I was starving the cpu of power, and that not only was It going to make my machine run slower, but it had the potential to destroy my cpu altogether.

I asked him If I should buy a new one, and He said that since I had had the pc for two years already that the damage was already done.

How much of what he said was true? I recently added a video card and another hard drive, and more ram and a dvd drive were on the way until he told me this. should I buy a new power supply? or is he right in saying that it isn't worth trying. please help

 

[jihiggs]

it can damage components but a weak power supply cant slow down a procesor. unless it was over heating or somthing. then the cpu would throttle back to save itself.

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[Crashman]

Nope, to begin with your system was designed for low power consumption through the integration of key components. And too little power to the CPU would cause your system to crash or reboot, not be slow.

There are several factors involved. To begin with, an P4 1.6 of the original variety, with RDRAM, was only marginally faster than the PIII 933. And your system might not even be using RDRAM, it might be using Single Data Rate SDRAM. That would slow the system down another 30%, because in reality the P4 was MUCH slower than the PIII, and used fast RAM to make up some of the difference.

Now I'm guessing you probably have integrated graphics. But if you're lucky enough to have a graphics card, it's probably crap. So it's not really a power issue, but a POWER issue, as in, your comptuer doesn't have any guts.

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[Obtuse]

Yes, as soon as you said "I am running an emachines" you diagnosed your problem. I'm not trying to be elitist, emachines has their place, they actually make pretty decent machines......FOR THE MONEY. Maximum PC tested their $500 dollar rig against a $620 emachines, and they said that it did decent, considering the emachines rig had peripherals and a monitor, and the Maximum PC one didn't. That being said, any decent rig, slower proc or not, will school the emachines.

 

[Crashman]

I don't own any eMachines and haven't had one move through here for a long time.

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