After reading a story this morning concerning what a great video card the AMD/ATI 2900 is, and then seeing the recommendation on the website of a minimum of a 750W PSU, I made the rounds [online, of course] to all the quality names in power supply production.

I learned that PC Power and Cooling has become a part of OCZ, and that they have a really cool red-orange 750W PSU, which would fit the bill nicely. I then went to several others, and they all have power supplies in the stated range, for a very wide variety of prices.

What not a single one has mentioned is how well the stated power supply fits into a certain case. This used to be no problem, as all power supplies came in 3 basic sizes, and the largest was also the most used. It meant that unless the user was building a small form factor machine, simply purchasing the proper wattage was usually enough.

Because bigger power can only be contained in the same form up to a certain point, the power supplies started getting bigger when moving beyond 550W. This, fortunately, has usually only been increased depth, but that still causes problems.

As with video cards, which also give dimensions, they don’t always fit, and some help would be great. Visualizing fit is not something easily done with things like owning your friends at the next LAN party at the front of your mind. As with video cards and the blocking of slots, and or access to some other needed part, some of these really large PSUs will completely negate the use of the 3 topmost 5¼ drive bays.

A short list of cases that would satisfactorily accommodate these behemoths would be oh-so-helpful.

[tags] PC Power & Cooling, Enermax, Antec, ThermalTake, Cooler Master, Fortron, Corsair, Mushkin, SeaSonic, TAGAN [/tags]