These components are products with a long service life, which makes it difficult to know when to change the power source. Keep in mind that they are not outdated like a processor, graphics card or RAM, but their purpose is very simple, but important.
It is important to know the keys or symptoms that warn us that it is time to change our source . Not everyone knows what they are, so they usually only change the source when it breaks or offers insufficient cables for all connections.
When to change your power supply
Next, we are going to teach you the keys you should know to know when it is time to replace the power supply. In addition, we will take the opportunity to give you some advice regarding a future update of this component, which we believe may be useful to you.
Insufficient power
It is the typical case in which we buy a power supply just for the equipment that we assembled at that time. Time has passed and we have updated the PC, keeping the power supply. However, the components that we have installed consume much more energy than those that we installed in the first instance.
So, we will have a source that does not supply enough power to all the components. You will see that we can turn on the PC and play with it, so what is the problem? Well, the GPU and CPU will not work at 100% of their performance because they do not receive enough power to make the most of their possibilities.
For those of you who want to update the source for this reason, take a look at what your GPU and CPU consume at full load to know how much power you need, as well as choose a good energy certification .
Reduce consumption
Your source may supply the energy that the PC needs, but the problem comes in the electricity bill . If our source has a non-existent or bad energy certification, it will be much less efficient than another that does have a good certification.
From an 80 PLUS Gold certification we obtain a significant change in the consumption of the source. So this is another reason why we need to know when to change the power supply.
If you choose a Titanium or Platinum certification, you can save a lot of money on your electricity bill.
When to change our power supply, if insufficient cables
This is a problem that affects sources with fixed wiring, since the modular or semi-modular have different configurations. With a fixed wiring source we will have to look for adapters that allow the connection of certain components, such as graphics cards.
In the end, we ended up getting sick of looking for adapters, so we ended up buying another power supply . However, in our opinion, it is a mistake to buy a source with this wiring again because we will have the same problem in the future.
A modular or semi-modular source will give us many more options in relation to the connection of components, as well as help us to reduce the heat because we will have fewer loose cables through the PC. This last fact acts as an obstacle with respect to the air circuit.
We advise you to change the power supply as soon as you start to install graphics cards with 2 connectors, such as when you add several hard drives with SATA connections.
Instability
It is rare for this event to occur, but you may have experienced some instability in your system. After thoroughly investigating, you conclude that the culprits are neither the CPU, nor the GPU, nor any other component. At a certain workload, the source may not be able to deliver enough power .
This can cause some instability in the system, such as FPS drops . Normally, it is an error that occurs in the power supplies, not being our problem. We insist that this phenomenon is not normal, but it can happen to you. Unfortunately, the solution is to check out and purchase a new font.
Break
There comes a fateful moment when the power supply says enough, and there is nothing we can do to fix it. So, arguably, this is one of the times where we will know 100% when to change the power supply as it has become inoperative.
From my personal experience, it is important that you connect the pins of the PC case to the motherboard well. If your source does not provide protection against short circuits or overloads, you may get a scare. In particular, misconnecting these pins can end the life of the power supply.
Likewise, it doesn’t have to break because of us. It is very common to break a power supply due to a voltage drop or because the leads jump.
