I just found out that i have a 305Watt power supply. I think it's very low, but I'm not sure... Anyways I was wondering if I buy a new power supply - say a 600Watt or 500Watt or something, can it potentially damage my computer? Like... can there be too much power for circuitry or my video card or something?

No, your machine should be fine.

Moving to hardware.

argh im sorry. I swear i looked for a hardware section on the forums but i missed it.
just to confirm by the way - 305Watts is quite low correct?

It all depends on your hardware. If you have a fairly old machine, you should be fine. If however you are running a multi-core cpu with a state-of-the-art 3d card (or several of those), you're in trouble.

Just to make sure: A stronger power supply will not have any impact on the performance of your machine. If your computer runs fine and you don't plan on sticking a lot of new devices into it, there's no reason for upgrading. If you actually plan on buying new HW, see how much energy that stuff consumes and buy your new power supply accordingly.

The watt rating of a power supply is how much it is rated to provide. A piece of hardware will only pull as much current as it actually will use, so having a power supply that's "too much" isn't possible.

305W is low, but it really depends on what hardware you have. If you have a low power processor, one stick of RAM, a medium or low-end video card and a single hard drive you'd be fine with 305W.

If you're like me and have five hard drives, a DVD burner, a power hungry dual-core processor, three sticks of RAM and a GeForce 7800GT, you should get something like a 500W power supply.

nice. thanks for replies. I am probably pushing the boundary because i have a gamer PC... but from like 4 years ago... but i have vid card and everything. The problem is that my World of Warcraft started crashing on me lately... like screen distorts and then goes black and i have to perform hard reboot, and when I touch my heatsink on my video card right after, it is burning hot. So i think the fan isn't keeping up. I was concerned that maybe the fan is not getting enough current to work properly.

there should be a way to monitor the fan speed.

It's not just watts. Amperes (specifically the +12V rail amps) matters as well. Companies, too. A 700W generic 14A +12V rail PSU is pathetic compared to a 400W PC Power & Cooling 28A +12V rail PSU, for example (not sure if such a PC P&C one exists, but this was an example of their greatness).

Quote: Original post by agi_shi
It's not just watts. Amperes (specifically the +12V rail amps) matters as well. Companies, too. A 700W generic 14A +12V rail PSU is pathetic compared to a 400W PC Power & Cooling 28A +12V rail PSU, for example (not sure if such a PC P&C one exists, but this was an example of their greatness).

So true. Don't end up buying a High Watt and Low Amp supply like I did. You'll have to buy another.