noobish psu questions

twhitten

n00b
Joined
Jan 27, 2005
Messages
26
I'm a card-carrying noob. I'm trying to determine what psu I need for my first build, but I'm having trouble deciphering some of the psu jargon. I know this is a lot of questions, but help with any one or all would be greatly appreciated.

1. What components run on the 3 available rails? I know the cpu runs on the 12v, but what about the gc, mem, hdd, optical, etc?

2. What is the (dis)advantage of a single 12v rail? What is meant by "balancing"? How do you balance the rail?

3. Some psu's list a "-12v" rail. What is this? How is it different from the +12v rail?

4. What is meant by "+5VSB@3.0A"? Is this another rail?

Finally, if my build is an e8400, radeon 4850, Asus p5q-pro mobo, WD6400AAKS hard drive, G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400), what rail specs should I be looking for? I would like to do modest overclocking in the future. I don't plan to do crossfire/sli in the near future.
 
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