HP Compac D530 for capturing box, is 240W Power Supply good enough?
 

This looks like a good unit to use with my AIW9600XT, as suggested by Lordsmurf,and an ATI user,but I think it comes with a 240 watt Power supply?,and can't be modified?? But I'd like to get it ASAP if this unit is good enough for capturing with a 2nd "Video Drive" and sound card installed.:confused:

This is the system you're referring to: http://www.overstock.com/Electronics...40&PID=3235990

A 240W power supply is really a bit low for a system of that era, but it could be accomplished if the system was built around low-power specs, which is likely the case here. As per past posts, somebody I know is running this exact system, and his video projects are moving along quite nicely.

He mentions his experience here, after I asked: http://www.tvpreservation.com/forum/...html#post55960
And then kctexan is also a member of The Digital FAQ forum: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/members/kctexan.html
We know each other offline, as well as online.

If he says it works, and he's not having problems, then I trust him.
In fact, I'll request he come here and give some details on his system specs, additions he made, etc, just to verify.

So sit tight. :)

My XP PC and ATI card setup
 

Hi. I have an HP Compaq D530 XP desktop PC, and according to the HP spec page for it (

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11632_div/11632_div.html#Overview ), the power supply is 185 Watts. I have an ATI 7500 All-in-Wonder video card in it, that I originally had in another XP PC, but that one expired and I had my local computer shop sell me this D530 for about $165, and I paid them another $15 or so to have them transfer the ATI 7500 into the "newer" XP PC, and use whatever software they had to ensure it was running well when I picked it up. That's what I would recommend, for your situation, with the (9600 AGP?) ATI card you have.

Hope I've answered your question, but feel free to ask me anything; I'll try my best to answer. :>)

Thanks kctexan,Yes my AIW 9600XT is AGP, I was suprised to see that your 180w power is working for your capture,I'm new to all this,but I was told that even 250w power may not be enough for AIW card,Sound card and a 2nd Hard Drive. (the 9600 requires a sound card to work). So I was wondering how your D530 is set up? (2nd Hard Drive,Sound card,ect..) And is yours is a compact, or tower? (Looks like the D530 came in 3 different models):confused:

XP PC setup to create SD DVD-Rs, continued...
 

Well, I'm not much of a power supply expert, but all I can tell you is that my HP/Compaq XP PC has no trouble whatsoever churning out SD DVD-Rs, year after year. I doubt seriously it could handle TAW4 authoring Blu-Ray discs, but of course, I do that on my other PC, with Windows 7 and Quad Core..etc etc.
In the HP XP PC, I have an ATI 7500 All-in-Wonder video card, which is externally connected to an internal sound card, by SB Audigy. I have an external 1TB hard drive to capture my MPG-2 recordings (99% from satellite service). Use ATI Multi Media Center version 8.7 to capture. I author (remove commercials, set beginning and end points, create DVD menus, etc.) using TMPGEnc Author 1.5, then burn the resulting DVD files (in a folder I create along the way) to SD DVR-s using ImgBurn burning program. I actually make and print labels right onto the DVD surface (inkjet printable version), and then watch it!!

Something I want to point out here is that your external drive is connected via Firewire 400, and not the more typical USB2 connection. (As per our phone chat.) This is an important detail that shouldn't be left out, for the following reason...

@bakenvids:

You really cannot capture to a USB2 drive without having some dropped frames, however a Firewire drive can sustain adequate "sustained" throughput, assuming all hardware and drivers are good. This would never be possible on a USB drive, with its dipsy-doodle unsustained writing speeds.

A power supply mostly gets pulled for CPU, graphics chips, and hard drive power. The Radeon graphics chipsets on these 7500 series cards are rather low power needs compared to 9000 series cards. Using an external hard drive for capture also offloads some power requirements. I have a feeling these HP systems may also be built around low-power specs internally. I've had systems like that in years past. (These days, I seem to waste energy. "More power, ruh ruh!" as Tim the Toolman would say.)

I still think this is your best bet: http://www.overstock.com/Electronics...40&PID=3235990
Good hardware, known to work, and it comes with Windows XP pre-installed.

Thanks for posting KC. :)

Thank you Gentlemen for the Info!

I spent most of today rebuilding computers, and that included rebuilding a power supply (taking a solder gun to the fuse).

A 250W power supply should be able to carry two hard drives, an AGP video card from ATI, one or two CD/DVD drives, and a good Pentium 4 era motherboard and CPU. I would not add more drives without jumping up to 300-350W. It's when you start adding more drives, need to leave it on for many hours endlessly (weeks/months without shutdown or reboot), or plan to really run the system at 100% CPU/RAM/HDD for long periods that pushes you towards 400-500W. (Anything above 500W is generally ridiculous.)

I can see how the 185W from kctexan is fine, and how a 240W would suffice as well.

I mostly use 500W power supplies because each system tends to be packed with drives (hard disks and optical), and these days most of the boxes run off dual and quad cores. Only ATI systems are singles, and the smallest still in use is 350W. But you don't have to match these systems, as I doubt you'll have 8+ drives inside (via Promise expansion cards). The 240W should work well.