for the minimum wattage that a power supply have to power a pentium 4 chip? the reason is im trying to build a p4 based computer out of old parts and i think I dont have a powersupply strong enough for it.
250-350 watts depending on your other system components and P4 generation. Northwood P4s maxed out at about 90w, Williamettes a bit lower, and I believe Prescotts reached 130w. All things considered, you won't reach these limits unless you're doing some heavy crunching. Lots of Dells in the Williamette generation ran 250 watt PSU's. I ran Northwoods on 350 and up to 550.
Turns out I had a bad processor actually, I swapped the new processor out for an older P4 (which btw is faster) and that processor worked. Im Installing ubuntu on that computer as I type this. Also seems that the 250w power supply I have is not compatible with the motherboard without a converter for the 12v power on the board.
I finished building it on saturday. It has 3.2ghz p4, 1.5gb ram, 60gb harddrive and pretty much cost me $120 to build, technically $70 as I got the processor and case for free at a yard sale, the mobo and the powersupply from a store, the optical drive, the ram, Video card (128mb radeon 9600se, it desperately needs an upgrade) and the HDD from an old emachine (which I should have salvaged parts off of, it had a good dvd drive, case, power supply, and probably processor, but the motherboard got fried by a powersurge).
That's funny. A few months back I sold my old P4 2.8, 1 GB of ram, and an Abit motherboard for about $100. There are still buyers for old P4's.
speaking of recommendations, i need a good AGP videocard, simply because the mobo i used in that computer doesn't have pci express. I currently have a radeon 9600 se in it, and it's showing it's age in world of warcraft
