Powering PC… easy, right?

Issues with power delivery

Newer desktops are becoming more power hungry and as a result we are creating new requirements for our electrical power delivery.

In some regions electricity can suffer from blackouts, brownouts, spikes, surges, and sags. From these spikes and surges are most common to cause damage to sensitive electronics like computers.

There are devices to protect against these occurances like UPS ( Uninterruptible Power Supply) and Surge Protectors, but what happens when the tools meant to help you start to cause issues?

Surge Protector Wear

Surge protectors as the name implies are meant to protect against surges in electricity. Common surge protectors use a component called metal oxide varistor (MOV). This component has a limited lifetime and it wears out everytime additional voltage is ran through it.

Some surge protectors continue to work as common power strips while others stop working all together.

Mine happened to do the latter and oh boy was it a headache…

Mysterious PC Reboots

For the longest time I had issues with my PC occasionally turning off. Didn’t matter if I was running Linux or Windows, it kept happening regardless. Over the years I changed GPU, PSU, Case, Fans, etc.

Nothing seemed off, temps were ok, no errors in general, good quality PSU, not an issue with AMD or Nvidia GPU… I just couldn’t make heads or tails what was going on.

The only time I saw some concistency was when my PC was under heavy load…

As my power requirements for my PC had grown via the upgrades I had done, the issues become more common. One evening I grew tired and starting closing off issues one by one. The only two components left on my list were

• Motherboard
• Power delivery

One of them would require complete rebuild, the other is pluggin the PC to the wall directly. Guess which one I chose?

Realization

After plugging my PC to the wall socket all of the random shutdowns were no longer visible! I felt like a winner!

But of course I wanted my setup to look nice, so why not use a power strip to hide some of the cables? I switched to a new power strip and called it a day… only to realise day later that my issues were back.

It turns out my modern Gaming PC with 850W PSU and a hungry hungry GPU along with a generic power strip is not a good combination.

Future?

I truly wonder about the future of power issues as power delivery needs keep growing every year? The joke of using your PC as a space heater is becoming more accurate after every new CPU and GPU launch…

If you want to delve into other PC power related issues, check out the melting power cable issue with NVidia RTX 4090.