would a 500watt antec supply power a system with 2-4 hard drives (possibly raid), 2 optical drives, 2 7600gt sli, plus motherboard ect... what type of power supply are people running now days with what systems?

Forget the 500 number.
That is probably the Max Peak Current Rating.
That means the maximum current for the second it takes to
charge all the caps on the mobo and begin the boot sequence.
That is NOT the all day running current for the supply.
The all day current could be as low as 300w.

You would do best to go to Antec's web site and read up on their supplies.

Personally, if I were building a system with all that hardware, I'd go on up
to about a 680 w. supply, with dual cooling fans.

Also, you've got lots of heat generators there. Be sure to provide plenty
of air circulation for those hard drives, or they'll roach themselves in their
own heat.

Good Luck,
Andromeda43

Depending on how much amps ur PSU has on the 12v rails it should power that lot fine, if not then u can always just get a OCZ GameXStream 600W or a Corsair HX 520W, either would be overkill for that system.

Well look up power users. most people use a 400. I am using a regular 160 and a outlit for adding and removing drives. A 230 might be good for the basics. Also High amounts of live storage and writing along with graphics proccessing requires lots of power.

400 is usually alot for most people. how much money cand u spend on a psu and what are your comps specs? full specs...

system would be XFX 7600gt SLI, OCZ DDR2 800 PC6400, Asus M2n-SLi Deluxe board, Thermaltake Armor tower. 3800+ am2 processor, DVD RW combo drive, 2-4 hard drives running 2 of them Raid and the other two alone.

I was looking at this supply


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817103937

The Corsair HX520 is an excellent power supply, and would more than meet your needs. You'd be able to run that system and still have room for more.

Corsair HX520 Review @ SilentPCReview.com

As a side note - if you want to find reliable PSU tests, SPCR is one of the few sites that actually does proper PSU testing. Many other places put the PSU "at load" by putting a high end system and connecting as many components as they can find to the PSU, but often this still isn't enough. SPCR uses a special PSU test rig (you can find the link in the article) that allows them to vary the load on the PSU to pretty much any value they choose.