Gadgetory


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Capacitors, Resistors, and Electronic Components

2017-01-31
if you're a seasoned PC builder or tinkerer you can probably rattle off a few different connectors and headers on your motherboard in your freaking sleep especially if you dream about RGB heat sinks like I do but what about all those other little tiny components for instance the capacitors and resistors that fill up all the extra space what exactly do they do well a big part of the reason you have so many electronic components on your motherboards PCB is that your computer parts like CPU graphics card memory etc typically can't use electricity directly from your power supply for example most of those 650 watts or whatever your power supply promises are delivered on the 12 volt rail but imagine what would happen if you put 12 volts through a modern CPU which only needs like 1/10 of that to run you'd fry it faster than an egg on a hot radio a sidewalk so because everything in your PC needs a very specific amount of power your board has lots of capacitors on it those are the cylindrical looking things that poke out of your motherboard like little tiny water towers in a little miniature city they even serve a somewhat similar function to the affer mentioned water towers they store energy then release it in a controlled fashion you see the power that comes into them doesn't flow completely smoothly and has small variances in voltage that could make it useless or even damage your components so these small capacitors clean up the power and deliver the silky-smooth constant voltage that your internal electronics need and if you open up a decent power supply make sure it's unplugged first you'll probably find some much larger capacitors that serve a similar function keeping a constant DC voltage for your computer and filtering out noisy AC interference also called ripple but although capacitors help to clean up the power resistors do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to controlling what voltages your components actually as you can probably guess a resistor resists the flow of current ensuring that your components won't get so much power that they'll be damaged although many hobbyists who have worked with simple circuits might be familiar with resistors that look like this with colored bands that indicate strength measured in ohms most resistors on modern motherboards are more understated in appearance looking like little black and silver rectangles okay then but what about all those blocky things near my CPU they don't look like capacitors or resistors and okay well you'd be right these are called chokes which and okay don't get too excited there are a type of inductor similar to how a capacitor will smooth out voltage an inductor will smooth out current important considering how much power a typical desktop CPU can draw you can learn more about CPU power delivery right up here and speaking of power delivery we would be remiss if we didn't mention our old friend the transistor you might know that there are millions or even billions of tiny transistors in your CPU and chipset that act as logic switches that allow your computer to function but there are larger ones on your motherboard close to the chokes that I mentioned earlier called MOSFETs since transistors can both change voltages and have logic gates your MOSFETs and CPU actually talk with each other to figure out the correct amount of voltage to deliver to the CPU at any given time then the MOSFETs take the electricity from your power supply adjust the voltage and pass it through the chokes and on to your processor so obviously the engineering that goes into making all of these parts work together properly is quite complex but hopefully now you have a better idea of why all those random bits on your motherboard are even there and if not you could always just buy one of those newfangled boards with the nice-looking shroud and RGB lights and forget everything that I just said it's not like you'll hurt John's feelings or and you will a lot actually but it's okay 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