New here, need help with power supply question

Well the current power supply on my computer is a weak 300w. I currently have an ATI Radeon x1600 pro that doens't require a seperate power supply, so it works fine. Well...this card just isn't fitting my gaming needs to I am upgrading and was looking at the geforce 7900 GT. Well this has a seperate cord that you need to attach to your power supply and it recommends at least 350w. So I have a couple questions.

1. Do I have to get another power supply? I only have 1 cd-rom drive, 1 hard drive, and 1 gig of memory. So since my system is "fully loaded" would it be totally necessary to get a bigger power supply?

2. Where do you connect it to the power supply from the graphics card? There's a cable coming off my hard drive that looks like it could connect to the card, but isn't the card supposed to go straight to the power supply? I don't understand where it connects to.

3. I have ATA connections for my hard drive and cd-rom drive. EVERY SINGLE power supply I looked up, they ALL say "SATA" or "SATA-ready". Will the "SATA-ready" ones still work with my ATA connections? If not, where in the world do I find a good power supply, 450-500w, that supports ATA connections?

If someone could please hlep i would greatly appreciate it, thanks!

 

1. It's best for the psu to meet or exceed the card's power requirement. In your case, 7900GT may drop framerates & even not power up with 300w.

2. A retail box will come with a power cable splitter. White plugs into your psu, black plugs into the card's top-right 6-pin connector.

http://www.kohryu.com/picture/galaxy/7900gt-all.jpg

3. SATA is pretty much standard. All psu's support ATA/PATA/IDE as well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16817104954
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153023

These are good budget psu's.

 

thank you very much for your help, I appreciate it a lot!

 

This PSU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153023 only has 18amp on single +12 rail, not enough power for any modern system, worse yet slim for some older ones too

In general Thermaltake makes some crap PSU's many have the power ratings fluffed
I would Avoid them



The other one posted Look's Good for budget PSU, 2 +12v rails with total of 36 +12v amp's
FSP (Fortron Sourse)makes some good product.