Tom's Hardware > Forum > CPU & Components > Power Supplies, PC Cases & Case Mods > [Solved] What does each rail do and what are safe voltages?

[Solved] What does each rail do and what are safe voltages?

Forum CPU & Components : Power Supplies, PC Cases & Case Mods - [Solved] What does each rail do and what are safe voltages?

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Best answer from Newf.

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Attila_the_pun   10-06-2009 at 01:44:33 AM

What does each individual rail supply power to and what is considered safe for deviations? ex. 3.38v on the 3.3v

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Best answer from Newf
These days the 12v rail(s) is/are most important.
Spec is 5%. Less is better.
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Newf   10-06-2009 at 01:46:46 AM
Best answer

These days the 12v rail(s) is/are most important.
Spec is 5%. Less is better.

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Attila_the_pun   10-06-2009 at 01:51:38 AM

My situation is that I am using an old power supply and some voltages are off. So if I have a 20% voltage deviation do I risk damaging components? Also I need to know what components could have been potentially damaged, by that.

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Attila_the_pun   10-06-2009 at 02:05:24 AM

What are considered safe? Should I just abide by the spec?

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Attila_the_pun   10-06-2009 at 02:11:36 AM

I realize that I will have to repair/replace this PSU, That above is just for future reference.

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Newf   10-06-2009 at 02:21:15 AM

Undervoltage causes system crashes, but won't necessarily harm anything. Overvoltage obviously fries all kinds of parts. More insidious is that any psu that's out of spec like that is also likely to be creating ripple, spikes and other harmful voodoo. You will not repair it. Get some M80s and blow it up...

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Attila_the_pun   10-06-2009 at 02:53:59 AM

It was a good PSU and until recently all the voltages were perfect.

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Newf   10-06-2009 at 10:23:49 PM

Attila_the_pun wrote :

It was a good PSU and until recently all the voltages were perfect.

You just answered your own question. It WAS a good psu. It's not a good psu anymore. Blow it up, or better yet make it a good shotgun target. If you're greener than mean, recycle it. Just get it out of your computer...
The 5% spec is actually a good alarm threshold. Even products that claim 5% do better than that (before they fail).

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JasonAkkerman   10-06-2009 at 10:43:21 PM

I had problems once with voltage lags on my video cards (2x 6800GT at the time). It happened after a breakdown and rebuild of the case for a good cleaning (very dusty). In an effort to reduce the number of cables running around I made extensive use of one of the cables powering HDD's and CD-ROM's. It turns out that the cable I chose to use shares the same rails as my video cards, which cause the voltage lags, and raised the warnings. After a lot of testing with a meter and reading on the net I figured it out. Evenly distribute the load across all available cables to solve the problem.

I'm not sure if this is any help, just thought I would share.

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