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Basic PC Troubleshooting: Test A Power Supply with a Paperclip

2012-02-29
hey everybody this is Steve from gamers Nexus net and we are testing a power supply today in this basic PC hardware guide we're going to use a paperclip a green wire and a black wire to test the power supply and make sure it turns on some power supplies will need to be put under load but I'll get to that in a second so first make sure your power supply is completely unplugged just for safety purposes there's really not much risk of getting shocked here but for safety purposes I would advise you to unplug it and completely turn off everything turn off the switch on the back find your green plug and your our green cable excuse me and your black cable which is ground and we are going to connect the green cable and the black cable via paperclip to jump them together and once they're connected which I'm doing right now you see I have them connected in the 24 pin or 20+4 pin connector rather and once those are together you can pretty easily just plug the power supply in like normally of course there are there's only one way to plug it in which takes me two or three tries at least so we're going to plug that in put that cable aside and then simply flip the switch and you'll see the fan spins up hopefully the YouTube quality isn't too bad but the you should see the fan spinning right now and then I'll go ahead and disable it and bring that a little bit closer so you can see it better now what I want to say is some power supplies won't respond to this technique I think the OC Z's power supply specifically won't because they need to be put under load otherwise they just won't even turn on so if that is the case with yours I have a trick coming up that will basically plug in some fans and put it under a tiny bit of load just a couple watts that way we can be sure that it's working this is not a extremely definitive test in terms of checking to see if the the right wattage is being supplied or to make sure the power supplies you know completely functional it is a good test though just to narrow down your options if you if you have some kind of failure along the line if your computer is not starting up this will help you tell you know hey is it my power supply as my motherboard what's going on here so this is a great always a great start when you're troubleshooting your PC and it's very easy so now you can see I'm grabbing the molex for pin 2 3 pin fan adapter I'm going to plug that into the fan that I pulled out of my CPU heatsink yesterday which is in the previous video and it is a very fast fan so I plug those in then we're just going to skip ahead here while I fumble through for the right wire and we connect the molex connectors and then we'll just do the same test again except this time with a fan and as I said ocz normally is the one that causes trouble some others do as well you may need a couple fans you might even want to plug your hard drive in there it's it's just plugging into the power supply and then turn it on it doesn't need to be in a system or anything like that just needs to spin up so here we go I'm reconnecting the green and the black wire as you can see and it has three green and black as I said there's minimal risk of shock because these power supplies are designed specifically not to cause those problems but you want to be safe then unplug everything and do it just like I did there and sometimes capacitors can store charge so you might want to use pliers if you want to be ultra safe but again you should be pretty in the clear here so we see that it turns on perfectly with the fan then spins up and this is actually the first time I tested this fan so it was a good way for me to see how fast and how loud is this fan in comparison to my replacement fan and the answer is it is a very fast and it is actually really quiet I think my new one's a little bit a little bit slower and and about the same noise level but I explained that last video so there you have it that's how you test the power supply hopefully that helped someone out and as always like this video if it helps you please subscribe to our Channel I can besides that enough subscribing really helps us make more videos a lot of you who have subscribed from the last video so I appreciate that keep subscribing keep liking comment on videos will help you out wherever possible I'll see you guys next time peace
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