Determining if you overworking a PSU

[SportyGuy220]

How can you tell if your PSU has too much stuff hooked to it? I have a 430w Antec PSU and i have 6 80mm fans hooked to it along with cd-r/rw drive, dvd drive, 2 hard drives, geforce 5200 FX, chaintech 5.1 pci sound card and my mobo and shit. But i thought 430w would be more than enough to hold what i have? Any opinions or info?

 

[Gruntled Employee]

It is probably ok until you upgrade again..unless it is locking up or anything I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Ice Czar]

well either you can calculate its load (sort of)
http://takaman.jp/D/index.html?english
or you can measure its stability

if you employ a software monitor like MBM, your able to see its relative stability
(but select a fairly high sample rate) however the calibration is in question,
and your unable to see anything at spinup when the HDDs and fans require
a higher amp draw to overcome inertia, and that can be 4 to 5 times as much

so

a multimeter is what is commonly employed to tell for sure
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/faqpowersupply.html

ideally you want to see even tighter specs than the 5% listed

if you where able to log a graph of a multimeter youd see something like these
http://terasan.okiraku-pc.net/dengen/tester/index.html

your Antec would look like this
Antec True 480

for comparison a PSU without dedicated rails and the tight tolerances of a True Power can look this bad
Codegen 300X1

note the obvious difficulty at spinnup
while that Codegen is one of the worse in the link above, many of the PSUs have problems with stability at startup, when trying to spinup the drives