PSUs are the death of hardware
PSU.. Power Supply Unit.
After working with many builds and never second guessing a PSU beyond good or bad I started to wonder if there wasn't more to them. For some reason I had never noticed the quiet little sound a PSU makes about 10 seconds after you unplug it. I was kindof wondering why it was discharging and where it was going to so I started looking up a few details. I come to find out that PSU's have a lot more to do with the overall stability and wellbeing of your system then anyone gives em credit for. There is even quite a significant difference between cheap and expensive PSU's.
After 'actively' noting that electricity is the only thing that truly determines what happens to a PC I assumed power supplies must be intensly complicated so I did some research.
All my research admitted to me that power supplies are not in fact as precise as I had imagined. In their simplest form they regulate the power comming in as best they can, convert it, and spit it out based on load disipating the little bit of extra power used to make that operation happen through the heatsink contained inside it. From there they get more high tech. Stepping out of the box, the first thing absolutely necessary to the survival of a PC is an efficient power stabilizing unit. A quality UPS/Surge protection system is a very good start. From my understanding of how PSU's are built, they do not have enough technology in them to safetly handle all the variations of power that run through our buildings. Delivering stabalized power is the first step to a clean running system.
After cleaning up the power going in it's simply a matter of understanding the power supply your using, your system load, and the ability for your power supply to handle the fluctuation in your system load. PSU's are divided into two channels stabalizing the power between the two based on the systems needs. What defines good PSU's from not so good PSU's is how it stabalizes the load when the PC starts requiring more or less power. Newer & more expensive PSU's stabalize the load as the power is needed keeping everything stabile. Older and cheaper PSU's experience lag when attempting to provide a change in wattage. Knowing JUST this bit of simple information is enough to bring the reality of how a PSU can effect your PC's current capability and lifespan. Tie in the flakyness of half the hardware in the world out there with a flucuating power source and your gunna have problems. This is where I believe most of americas personaly built PC's flake. I could work my way deeper into the complexities of UPS's but I'm going to leave this post simple. It's just a note to hopefully trigger another thought process in the minds of those building a PC. It's not just the 500W label that matters. It's the tested stability of the PSUs ability to load balance and the consistancy of the power going into it that matters.
Here are two resources that I found to be very helpful, short reads but extremely informative if you know nothing of PSU's.
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