Will A Mini-tower Get too Hot?

[Cropper]

Is a Mini-tower PC too cramped to add an additional harddrive and a tv card? The PC I'm leaning toward getting is a Dell Dimension 8400 but im concerned about air flow in its Mini-tower and then theres the power supply, Is 350 Watts enough? Any opinions or Comments sure would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mike

[bazooka]

If you have enough fans, it should be ok.

350 watts is the bare minimum these days.

You might be better off getting a more powerful power supply.

[ViRaL1]

Their mini-towers are still fairly roomy. If there's space for another drive and another card you should be fine.

[tekkieman]

I have a Dell mini tower, and added a TV card and second HD. No problems with overheating (once I fixed the broken retaining clip on the heatsink).

During an encode I will hear the fans speed up, but never had a problem.

[Cropper]

Thanks everybody

Mike

[Poppa_Meth]

From what I've heard Dell's PSUs are capable of a lot more than you think from looking at the wattage. Someone else will probably have more info on that than me.

[waheed]

Wattage on PSUs dont say much, you also need to look at the amps on the 3.3v, 5v and 12v rails, most importantly the 12v rail as the CPU, motherboard and GPU mainly draw the power of the 12v rail. i read somewhere it is reccomended to have at least 20 amps on the 12v rail for a decent system.

350 watts is suficient provided it is not a powerful system. cant really say if 350 watts is enough without knowing your computer specs.

[smearbrick1]

Wattage on PSUs dont say much, you also need to look at the amps on the 3.3v, 5v and 12v rails, most importantly the 12v rail as the CPU, motherboard and GPU mainly draw the power of the 12v rail. i read somewhere it is reccomended to have at least 20 amps on the 12v rail for a decent system.

350 watts is suficient provided it is not a powerful system. cant really say if 350 watts is enough without knowing your computer specs.

I am currently running 3 160gb hard drives, tv wonder card, ati pci xpress graphics card, dvd rom reader and dvd-rw/+rw drive and have no issues with the PS in my Dimension 8400.

[Cropper]

Hey smearbrick1,
How do you like your Dell D 8400? Would you recomend getting one?
Theres a long thread in cnet's forum about their sub-par customer support.
Thanks again for the input everybody.
Mike

[Poppa_Meth]

Their customer support is out of India. Problem is you have a hard time understanding them through the accent and sometimes they are very hateful. The quality is decent in the PC itself but you can get the same thing cheaper if you built it yourself.

[smearbrick1]

Hey smearbrick1,
How do you like your Dell D 8400? Would you recomend getting one?
Theres a long thread in cnet's forum about their sub-par customer support.
Thanks again for the input everybody.
Mike

I'm very happy with it. I wouldn't know anything about customer support because, I never use it. I've only used Dell support once when my 8100's motherboard was shot. I called and said, "my 8100's motherboard is shot, please send a new one." They guy tried to ask a bunch of questions about what the problem was, but I sort of blew the off. They had a service guy out the next day to replace the board.

As far as being able to build one for what I paid for it and getting a better system... that's debatable.

I only paid about 1000.00 for the entire pc from Dell. The only thing I added was a LiteOn DVD-RW/+RW and the two IDE hard drives. The cost included a 3 year in home service warranty. How many home built pc's have a 3 year in home warranty? How many have a 3 year warranty period?

Other than the somewhat annoying whistling processor fan, I'm very satisfied with it.