A glossary of common power supply terms

[Onus]

The secondary does so much though, but you could just say it's the "low voltage" area of the PSU, where the voltages your PC needs are produced, and load monitoring is done to see how high the duty cycle on the Primary side needs to be to meet the demand.

 

[Proximon]

Yes, now that's more like it I'll get that in a bit later tonight, or at least incorporate it in the final def.

 

[e56imfg]

heatsinks-metal things attached to the mosfets (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors) to direct the heat away from the mosfets. these are a little different in every psu, but they are generall a silver in color. the more surface area, the better the heatsink. psus also usually have a fan to aid in keeping the insides of the psu cool so that the heatsinks can dso their job. the heatsinks in a psu are similar in conecpt to those on ur cpu, graphics card, and motherboard chipset. Caution: some psu jeatsinks are part of a circuit on inside the psu, so removing them may cause damage to the cpu. also, touching themcan give you a nasty and potentially fatal shock. there are fanless psus out there, but they are very expensive. or you can do this:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article80-page1.html
LOL!

Old thread, I know. But I... touched a PSU heatsink while it was plugged in...
It really, really hurt. It wasn't fatal, but damn, it was huge. The wall outlet shut down on me...


Anyways... could someone explain the myth of modularity? I heard modularity sacrifices some performance. Is that true? If so, could someone explain why that is? I heard a few manufacturers built something that will get around that, I think it was the XFX Core.

EDIT: Will I die from the shock? It's been a day, I have no burns, I can touch people without killing them lol, and I can touch metal objects just fine.

 

[hunter315]

You managed to post so the shock isn't going to kill you(its an instant kill if its going to) but you may see some burns show up under your skin in a few days, the current travels through the blood vessels not along the surface so it can leave interesting results.


As for the myth about modularity sacrificing efficiency, it is true. Every connection in a wire provides resistance, the connectors are not nearly as conductive as we would like so they do cause some power loss; however, you are already losing more power to the length of the cable and the connection to the board than you do to the connection to the PSU. Jonnyguru did a test of this a few years ago, here is the article
http://www.motherboards.org/articles/guides/1488_1.html

A quote from his conclusion sums most of it up nicely.

Someone once said that a modular connector's pins have as much resistance as two feet of wire. I can't recall where that came from, but I think our five subjects have shown us that there's actually as much as four times as much voltage lost in a mere 18 inches of cable than there is in a modular connector. And when thinking about a loss in voltage in a modular connector, one shouldn't look just at the fact that a power supply has a modular connector, but perhaps how that modular connector is made.

 

[e56imfg]

You managed to post so the shock isn't going to kill you(its an instant kill if its going to) but you may see some burns show up under your skin in a few days, the current travels through the blood vessels not along the surface so it can leave interesting results.


As for the myth about modularity sacrificing efficiency, it is true. Every connection in a wire provides resistance, the connectors are not nearly as conductive as we would like so they do cause some power loss; however, you are already losing more power to the length of the cable and the connection to the board than you do to the connection to the PSU. Jonnyguru did a test of this a few years ago, here is the article
http://www.motherboards.org/articles/guides/1488_1.html

A quote from his conclusion sums most of it up nicely.

Someone once said that a modular connector's pins have as much resistance as two feet of wire. I can't recall where that came from, but I think our five subjects have shown us that there's actually as much as four times as much voltage lost in a mere 18 inches of cable than there is in a modular connector. And when thinking about a loss in voltage in a modular connector, one shouldn't look just at the fact that a power supply has a modular connector, but perhaps how that modular connector is made.

Will I burn up to my death? or will my blood vessels explode? or implode into a black hole destroying everything in the universe?

What burns? I'm a bit scared now... Will the burns hurt?

As for the modularity, does that mean modularity has more pros than cons than a directly connected system?

 

[hunter315]

You will be fine, don't worry about it. All the damage that would have occurred has already been done. You might be a bit tender in that area but if it doesn't hurt right now it won't hurt much if any.

As for the modularity, i dont think you can really say either way, it is true that modular connectors do introduce more voltage drop and another failure point for the cable that fixed units do not, and the benefits of modularity really depend on the user and the system its going in. Having the main 24 pin and 8 pins be modular doesn't gain you anything since they need to be used at all times anyway so i would actually say hybrid/semi-modular is the best option since you really don't need everything to be able to disconnect.