Seems like a pretty straight forward calculation:
Take Power Supply Wattage and subtract component powers:
250
-110 (4800 CPU)
-10 (Western Digital HDD)
-32 (My particular DVD Drive)
---------
98 Watts.
That leaves 98 watts for your video card to consume. One benchmark
I've seen says the 9700 GT uses 48 watts under 3D load and the 9700
GTX uses 84 watts under 3D load.
If that is the case you can have your CPU, Harddrive, DVD drive, and
Video card all running balls to the wall, and still have 10-12 watts
before you reach the max wattage. Since I copy all my games to my
harddrive from the DVD, I will have an extra 32 watt buffer on top of
the 14 watt difference.
If you are really worried about wattage, get the PC50 300Watt Silent X
Power Supply. I think it is overkill, but that is for my setup...
maybe your setup pulls more power? Find out for yourself by
searching Google.
Ya my method isn't 100% exact, however after seeing the Shuttle
compatible video card list for the SN21G5, I'm pretty durn close.
There are cards on there that use a little more than the 7900 GTX.
My method doesn't take into account the power your Mobo/Memory use
(definately not 46 watts though). On the other hand a good power
supply that is rated at 250 watts can handle a little bit more than
what it is rated for if you are comfortable with it.
I'd rather play my games from harddrive anyway. I don't give a flying
$hit what media the game vendors think I should be playing my games
on. I hate level load times and will always find the
"patches" required to play the game the way I want to play
it. I've even gone so far as to put disc images on a fast external
drive (still a lot faster than DVD random access times)
