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I understand that sometimes there may be a situation where the PSU is way more than required but in this case of mine, I'm not too sure.

Sometimes when I play games, my computer will crash and restarts itself, 10 minutes into the game. Once I received a message that says something like the power is overheating or something like that.

I have a 500W PSU. I have:

  • 1x Internal DVD writer
  • 1x SATA 250GB HD
  • 1x Nvidia 8500 GT
  • 2GB RAM.

As I'm planning to get an additional 250GB SATA HD, I wonder if I need to increase my PSU as well -- in full knowledge of the previous crashes experienced before.

Should I upgrade my PSU to 650W perhaps, or is that excessive?

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An additional hard drive won't really drain the PSU that much. What I would do is check that your CPU isn't overheating. – Randolph West Feb 28 '11 at 4:51
I second Randolph's comment, this sounds like a heat problem, not a power problem. Make sure all your fans are spinning and not covered in dust. This could be the GPU overheating as well, so be sure to check that fan too. – MaQleod Feb 28 '11 at 4:56
Duplicate question: superuser.com/questions/209955/… – Richard Feb 28 '11 at 7:59
@Richard, I think there might be more going on here, than just his PSU, so I'd advise against closing for now – Ivo Flipse♦ Feb 28 '11 at 10:45
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@IvoFlipse: Sort of disagree: the answer here is use one (or more) of the online calculators (as answered on other Qs) to see what is needed. I sort of agree: they might come back saying 500W is enough :-) – Richard Feb 28 '11 at 10:50
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Regarding the crashing issue - it's possible that the error message about power was just a red herring. You might want to check out HW Monitor to see if you can spot any overheating or other anomalies.

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I'm sorry Kara, but what is a red herring??? – Googooboyy Mar 9 '11 at 11:52
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My bad, I'm addicted to obscure phrases! Basically it's when something draws your attention away from the real culprit with a clue that doesn't actually help you find the problem. Windows loves to give me error messages that are completely misleading. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring – Kara Marfia Mar 9 '11 at 13:47
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