The Power Supply

The internal power supply is responsible for converting your standard household power into a form that your computer can use. The power supply is responsible for powering every device in your computer; if it has a problem or is of low quality you may experience many difficulties that you may not realize are actually the fault of the electrical system. This section discusses what makes up the power supply and how it works in detail. The power supply plays an important role in the following areas of your system:

Stability: A high quality power supply with sufficient capacity to meet the demands of your computer will provide years of stable power for your PC. A poor quality or overloaded power supply will cause all sorts of glitches that are particularly insidious, because the problems occur in other, seemingly unrelated, parts of the system. For example, power supplies can cause system crashes, can make hard disks develop bad sectors, or cause software bugs to appear, problems which can be very difficult to trace back to the power supply. Cooling: The power supply contains the main fan that controls the flow of air through the PC case. This fan is obviously a major component in your PC's cooling system. Energy Efficiency: Newer PC power supplies work with your computer's components and software to reduce the amount of power they consume when idle. This can lead to significant savings over older systems. Expandability: The capacity of your power supply is one factor that will determine your ability to add new drives to your system, or upgrade to a more powerful motherboard or processor. Many people don't realize, for example, that a high-speed Athlon CPU and motherboard consume far more power than a similar Pentium-based system, and the power supply needs to be able to provide this power. If you build a new system with a power supply that barely meets your needs, you may have to replace it when you upgrade down the road.

Power Supply Functions and Signals

The power supply's main function is simple: take the power input to it from the power system of your home or office, and turn it into a form that the PC can use. However, the PC power supply's job isn't as simple as that of a standard power converter, such as the kind you might plug into your car's lighter socket to let you run a TV off your car battery. The PC power supply must provide several different voltages, at different strengths, and must also manage some additional signals that the motherboard uses. AC-DC Voltage Conversion The electricity you get from your utility company is in the form of alternating current (AC), while the electricity your PC requires is direct current (DC).

Therefore, the primary function of your power supply is to convert your wall AC power into a DC form that your PC can use. In fact, the supply normally provides several different voltage levels, to meet the demands of different components in the machine. In fact, while almost everything in your home runs off standard AC power, many devices actually use DC internally. Just a few examples of this are telephone answering machines, many types of audio equipment, some kinds of battery chargers, and in the PC world, certain types of printers, external modems and other peripherals. Two indicators that a device actually uses DC inside are: the ability of the device to run on batteries, and the presence of a device outside the unit that powers it. These small "bricks" with one plug for the wall and another for the device are often called AC adapters (sometimes the "term of endearment" wall wart is used, in honor of the way they are usually designed to hang right out of a wall socket. :^) ). AC adaptors are really DC power supplies that converts the AC of the wall into DC for the device. The difference between this sort of DC power supply and the kind in your PC is the design. AC adapters are linear power supplies. These supplies are cheap and simple to make. The main problem with them is that they are tremendously wasteful; typically, 50% or more of the energy supplied to one of these adapters is wasted as heat. You can feel this readily--just touch the adapter when the unit is working; many become quite hot to the touch. A hot AC adapter means electricity is being wasted. This is an acceptable compromise for small appliances, but unacceptable for a PC power supply.

An AC adaptor supply) for a battery charger.

(linear

power

Instead of the linear design, PCs use switching power supplies. (The full name for this sort of design is actually "constant-voltage, half-bridge forward-converting switching power supply", but don't worry, that won't be on the final exam. :^) ) Explaining in detail how the design works would take many paragraphs and make your eyes gloss over unnecessarily. In a nutshell, the

switching power supply uses a transistor switch and a closed feedback loop to produce DC output that is properly regulated regardless of the load on it, with only the amount of AC power required to draw the DC load being taken from the utility.

Simplified block diagram of one design for a switching power supply. Note the voltage sense line and circuit, which act as a closed feedback loop to control the output of the supply, increasing it as demand increases, decreasing it as load is reduced. The main advantage of a switching power supply is that it is far more efficient than a linear design. When you are dealing with hundreds of watts of power, this is a more serious issue than when you are talking about an answering machine. The second advantage is that all the energy wasted in the power supply as heat has to be removed by the PC's cooling system. Therefore, more efficient power supplies produce less heat that the system has to exhaust. The main disadvantage of a switching supply is that it generates high-frequency signals within it as part of its conversion process, which can radiate out of the unit and cause interference to other electronic devices (inside or outside the PC). For this reason, you will always see PC power supplies encased in metal boxes for shielding. The power factor of a device refers to the ratio of the actual power used by the device to the product of the current and voltage supplied to it. Traditional power supplies have a power factor of about 0.6 to 0.7. The power factor is important especially for determining the sizing of UPSes as well as circuits that supply larger units. Some newer power supplies, especially larger ones for servers, have additional circuitry added to correct the power factor of the supply. These are, unsurprisingly, called power-factor-corrected supplies, and have a power factor of (or near) 1.0. They make UPS sizing either easier or more confusing, depending on how you look at it :^) Another reason why power-factor correction is being added to some supplies is that low power factor devices, if used in sufficient quantities, cause problems for electrical utilities. In some parts of the world the utility companies are starting to impose surcharges on companies with excessive loads at low power factors, though this is not really a concern for a home PC user.