How to check the power supply of your computer for work at home

Sooner or later, but everything in our life comes to an end one day, and anything can go wrong. And absolutely suddenly. So do not be surprised that one fine (or not so) day, we, having decided to turn on the computer, suddenly do not hear such a familiar sound of a running cooler. Very unusual and unpleasant sensation. What is the problem? If you think carefully, then deductively you can come to the conclusion that if the electric device does not turn on, it means that it does not receive power. Is it logical? Or this option: the current is not fed to the power supply unit, or the same current simply does not flow from the unit to the system. What to do and how to be? How to check the power supply for operation?

It is clear that the above-mentioned unit is responsible for supplying the computer with electricity. If it is burnt out or otherwise out of order, it is possible to expect the breakdown of other elements of the internal "filling". Therefore, with great responsibility it is necessary to approach the choice of a reliable and powerful "nutritional" element. How to check the power supply of the computer yourself? There are several ways. Here's one of them, and you need to do the following: try to sequentially plug the unit into the network using the most ordinary incandescent bulb up to 40 watts of power. This will minimize the likelihood that a short circuit will occur, in which case the lamp will light up in full glow.

How to check the PC power supply differently? The next way is using a voltmeter. To do this, you need to connect the unit to the network and measure the voltage at the 9th pin of the motherboard socket. Specialists call it "on duty". Ideally, the voltage should be about 5 volts. If it corresponds to this parameter, then you can not be afraid and safely connect the unit.

But this check does not stop there. It is very important to know how to check the power supply of the computer at the time of its full load. To this end, you can resort to the use of so-called pull-up resistors. They make it possible to determine the reliability of a block with a sufficiently high probability. Experts recommend choosing resistors, whose power is 20-25 W. They are ideally suited to check most models of blocks in the middle price range.

So how do you test the computer power supply with the help of pull-up resistors? They need to be connected to the unit and then measure the load, be sure to pay attention to the norms that are permissible and specified in the technical data sheet of the appliance. If the results that you have received correspond to them, it means that the block can be completely trusted. If the figures obtained are higher than those indicated in the data sheet, then this unit may not only be unreliable, but also dangerous to use.

Now you know how to test the computer power supply. There is another way that can help in this situation. Disconnect all power wires from the video card, motherboard, hard drive, etc. (You can leave the DVD drive, it is not badly afraid of voltage drops). Next, you need to take a main power cable for the motherboard and short it black and green connectors using a regular clip (straightened). Take the tester. Plug the power supply first to the mains and then switch it on using the switch. As soon as it starts, the black test lead of the tester needs to be inserted into any of the black power wires, and the red one is inserted alternately into the other, multi-colored pins. And now the parameters that appear on the display of your tester, check with the following indicators (these are the numbers you should see):

- orange - 3.3V;

- White - 5V;

- Red - 5V;

- Yellow - 12V;

- pink (or purple) - 5V;

- blue - 12V.

If your indicators deviate at least by one from these norms, this means that the unit issues either increased or decreased voltage, and therefore is faulty.