if it doesnt have enough power??

[hat]

What's the worst possible outcome of trying to run a p4 system with a 500w card off a 300w power supply?

[Ketxxx]

stuff will just not get enough power, worst case scenario causing odd behavior like random restarts, games bombing to desktop, that kind of thing.

[AshenSugar]

the psu blows killing every part in the system as it blows fire out the back catching ur house on fire.
and im not kidding i have seen psu's blow fire/sparks and catch a school portable on fire when i was in highschool!!!!! a little retarded kit(i was a sped teachers TA) put it out with an extinguisher, killing 3 mac "road apples" in the prosess :)

if its a good 300watt like my old enermax units it may handel it very well, but it could blow and take out everything you own and then catch fire, i would pay the 40-50bucks and get an epower or fortron 400+watt psu!!!

[Ketxxx]

stop over dramatising. ive had plenty cheap shitty psus die in spectacular fashion, things havent caught fire or the house exploded or any crap like that.

[hat]

dont scare me, ashen :(

[Ketxxx]

seriously, nothing drastic will happen. if your THAT worried just check what the readings are for your 3.3\5 and 12v rails. if their low (eg your 12v reads 11.5v) dont try overclocking anything.

[hat]

3.3 - 20a
5 - 30a
12 - 10a

[AshenSugar]

its not commo but i have seen it happen ket, no house fires but i have seen a couple old systems cause small fires, and i have seen and had cheap psu's blow every part in a system many times, i worked at a shop that use to use the psu's that came with the cases, saw MANY system come back that i had to RMA the board/ram/cpu/video/hdd/optical/soundcard and anything else in the case(floppy) because when the psu went it took EVERYTHING with it.
worst case of this was acctualy a server system that hat a HiPro psu(supposedly decent eps/esp psu, the system had 8 seagate baracuda scsi drives(in 0+1 raid) as well as dual xeon p3 cpus(1.x gz) cdrom, magneto optical backup drive, floppy, 4x4port nics and 2gb ram, and guess what, every singel part was destroyed when that psu went, and the psu blew sparcs, it was on security cam, the guy in the security room called down and sent somebody to unplug it, when it got to us(video included for shits and giggles) i had to RMA the whole damn thing to the system maker(it was a boxed server from an OEM) but i tested all the parts in working test beds and nothing worked, even the floppy drive was cooked, yeah fires may be rare but parts dieing due to psu blowing due to poor quility or overload isnt uncommon at all, check newegg, i would guess that about 85% of the people who have new boards/videocards/hdds die in new builds have it happen because they used that shitty arse PowerUp psu(psu that comes with the cheap case they bought)

[Ketxxx]

there are always going to be odd occasions everything dies with smoke etc, im yet to see\experience anything on that scale, its that rare. and trust me, in 12yrs or so, ive seen a fair few psus\other random components go up is rather spectacular fashion. many connected components have lived on happily :p

[hat]

so should i try it or not :(

[AshenSugar]

only other part i saw blow like that was a video card that acctualy had the core explode off the card!!!! was an nvidia card and the core poped, loud to, my uncal called me, turned out when the card went it fryed his agp port!!! he wasnt happy, thankfully frys is pretty close and carryed that board, so we did a buy and swap on the video card and board!!!

[hat]

I feel I made the right decesion.
I have my raving lunatic (6800XT) in the box on the shelf, sadly.
Gay whiny antec 500w in it's box ready for RMA.
Trusty 5200 ultra back in.
You see, I did not want to risk haveing the capacitors in the antec 500 blow and kill something with it. I also did not want to rist feeding a fat 500w card with only 300. So I guess it's 2 weeks with the trusty 5200 ultra and the Allied 300w. Hey, at least I get to overclock :)