Capacitors, Resistors, and Electronic Components
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
929 words · ~4 min read
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if you're a seasoned PC Builder or tinkerer you can probably rattle off a
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few different connectors and headers on your motherboard in your freaking sleep
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especially if you dream about RGB heat sinks like I do but what about all those
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other little tiny components for instance the capacitors and resistors
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that fill up all the extra space what exactly do they do well a big part of
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the reason you have so many electronic components on your motherboard's PCB is
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that your computer parts like CPU graphics card memory Etc typically can't
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use electricity directly from your power supply for example most of those 650
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Watts or whatever your power supply promises are delivered on the 12vt rail
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but imagine what would happen if you put 12 volts through a modern CPU which only
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needs like a tenth of that to run you'd
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fry it faster than an egg on a hot radi uh sidewalk so because everything in
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your PC needs a very specific amount of
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power your board has lots of capacitors on it those are the cylindrical looking
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things that poke out of your motherboard like little tiny water towers in a
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little miniature City H they even serve
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a somewhat similar function to the aformentioned water towers they store
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energy then release it in a controlled
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fashion you see the power that comes into them doesn't flow completely smooth
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ly and has small variances in voltage that could make it useless or even
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damage your components so these small capacitors clean up the power and
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deliver the silky smooth constant voltage that your internal Electronics
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need and if you open up a decent power supply make sure it's unplugged first
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you'll probably find some much larger capacitors that serve a similar function
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keeping a constant DC voltage for your computer and filtering out no noisy AC
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interference also called Ripple but although capacitors help to clean up the
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power resistors do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to controlling
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what voltages your components actually get as you can probably guess a resistor
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resists the flow of current ensuring that your components won't get so much
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power that they'll be damaged although many hobbyist who have worked with
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simple circuits might be familiar with resistors that look like this with
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colored bands that indicate strength measured in ohms most resistors on
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Modern motherboards are more understated
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in appearance looking like little black and silver rectangles okay then but what
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about all those blocky things near my CPU they don't look like capacitors or
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resistors and okay well you'd be right these are called chokes which and okay
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don't get too excited they're a type of inductor similar to how a capacitor will
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smooth out voltage and an inductor will smooth out current important considering
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how much power a typical desktop CPU can draw you can learn more about CPU power
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delivery right up here and speaking of power delivery we would be remiss if we
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didn't mention our old friend the transistor you might know that there are
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millions or even billions of tiny transistors in your CPU and chipset that
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act as logic switches that allow your computer to function but there are
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larger ones on on your motherboard close to the chokes that I mentioned earlier
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called mosfets since transistors can both change voltages and have logic
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gates your mosfets and CPU actually talk
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with each other to figure out the correct amount of voltage to deliver to
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the CPU at any given time then the
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mosfets take the electricity from your power supply adjust the voltage and pass
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it through the chokes and onto your processor so obviously the engineering
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that goes into making all of these parts work together properly is quite complex
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but hopefully now you have a better idea of why all those random bits on your
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motherboard are even there and if not
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you could always just buy one of those new fangled boards with the nice looking
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