Gadgetory

these days buying a power supply is pretty straightforward unless you're going for a really specific aesthetic get an ATX power supply which by the way are compatible with ATX micro ATX and mini ITX motherboards all you gotta do is make sure it isn't some kind of bargain-basement no-name unit that will explode when you try and run Crysis and that has enough wattage to power your rig and with high-end graphics cards getting more and more power efficient these days and those are usually the most power hungry part of a computer getting a PSU that sufficiently powerful is becoming less and less important by the day but it wasn't always as easy as just slotting in the first thing you could find and carrying on with your computing in fact the power supply that came with the original IBM PC only provided 64 watts of power pushed a whopping 5 volts through the CPU which would fry any modern consumer grade processor and forget about fancy features like standby err soft reset old-school power supplies only had a hard power switch so everything was either fully on or fully off all the time with that said though the really difficult thing about these older power supplies was there physical layouts even in the era of 80 power supplies the predecessor to ATX that lasted from 1984 until the late 90s there were not only multiple different form factors such as baby 80 xt and some weird thing that worked with ps2 but some systems even had switches soldered directly to the computer case out of the power supplies so good luck replacing your PSU if it suddenly fizzled out further adding to the frustration of technicians and tinkerers everywhere and then as if that weren't enough there wasn't even one uniform standard for the actual pin outs onto the motherboard amongst these different form factors I mean the power supply scene was basically chaos but the ATX standard saved us from an eternal quagmire of proprietary form factors when it was introduced in 1995 by Intel especially as it actually did a lot more than just make our power supplies mostly the same size in fact the ATX standard made things much easier for home PC builders as well as small shop owners who wanted to build or offer something different than what the IBM's of the world were cranking out and not only did it make things easier having just one standard made things cheaper improving competition throughout the industry and generally speaking higher quality as well as a single standard forced manufacturers to innovate and improve on quality rather than focusing their efforts on trapping us in to proprietary vil and that's exactly what happened assuming of course you're buying from a reputable brand ATX power supplies have evolved they've come in large and small varieties with both 80 and 120 millimeter fans yet they're still ATX compliant and can fit in a wide variety of cases combine that with improved efficiency in recent years as we've seen with the 80 plus rating system and ATX has had fantastic staying power in spite of several companies trying to replace it throughout the years such as an tech with their CPX design a few years back and even Intel who tried to replace their own standard with the now-defunct BT X form factor ATX also brought us familiar things that we now take for granted like the 20 and then later 24 pin connector which serves as the primary power delivery for pretty much all modern pcs but the wires that connect to the motherboard to enable smart power management and a greater emphasis on 12-volt power delivery you see older power supplies often delivered most of their power on the 5 volt rail with many actual sensitive components directly connected to it these days the smaller transistors on parts like CPUs and graphics cards play much more nicely with lower voltages immediately think about overclocking your CPU putting 2 volts you might kill it what but on the flip side as computer components have become faster and more powerful they actually need even more current that's the amount of electricity being sent through the chip so modern power supplies have more power on the 12 volt rail and then it gets converted to lower voltages for the many different components by voltage regulator modules or VR ends and those will be present on the motherboard or on the graphics card itself this way the components can operate at a safe voltage and still get enough current from the higher capacity 12 volt rail ATX has also changed with the times in other ways introducing PCI Express power connectors as graphics cards went from sipping electricity to becoming the most power hungry component in a PC a further testament to its staying power when many other computer standards have been put out to pasture within its lifetime but that doesn't mean then that all modern power supplies use the exact ATX form factor there are also derivative form factors such as SFX which is essentially identical to ATX electrically and in fact interoperable with ATX motherboards but a heck of a lot smaller making them popular for things like super small mini ITX builds in servers you'll find power supplies that have a couple of EPS connectors so EPS standard power supplies which actually is kind of funny because that eight pin CPU power connector ended up making its way into desktops as well and finally there are things like tf-x for slim tower systems or I mean they still do exist the dreaded proprietary power supply fortunately for you though the PC DIY enthusiast most of those power supplies are nearly irrelevant unless of course you find yourself working for a YouTube channel where you have to solder connectors on weird power supplies you found in a scrap heap somewhere in order to get a computer to boot at the last moment in a competition say for example speaking of getting things done in just a moment Braintree pane my friends Braintree is the way to achieve easy mobile payments maybe you're working on the next goober Airbnb or github well 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