What does a power supply do in a circuit?

Answer 1

A PSU (Power Supply Unit) converts the power received from the wall outlet to the power power needed to supply power to the mother board and all other components within the PC.

Answer 2

Everything in your computer requires power. The power supply has leads running to the motherboard to support CPUs, PCI slots and their respective devices, USB ports and optical drives.

#2 ---

A power supply does not really supply power in the sense of a reservoir, it is actually a power converter. Light bulbs and heaters use the power coming out of your wall, but there is no electronic gadget that uses power directly from the wall. The 110 volts AC (alternating polarity) power must be converted to voltage levels that the circuits are designed for, and usually at low voltage 5 or 12 volts DC (steady direct polarity). There is a huge industry that builds power supplies that do this.

Answer 3

A computer's power supply supplies electric power on various voltage levels to the computer's motherboard and peripheral components. Typical voltage levels used internally with PC-style computers are 12V, 5V and 3.3V DC in different rails, where some are switched off when the computer is in standby, others are only off when the computer is actually unplugged from the mains.

The power supply's job is to provide the various voltage levels in the various rails, in a sufficient quality. That is, the DC voltage must be sufficiently smooth and must vary more than the specified tolerance levels within the nominal load range. The combined power varies with the device and can range from a few tens of watts to several hundreds of watts.

Different types of computers, such as those used within tablet computers, smart phones or general embedded devices often have different power requirements.

On portable devices, power supplies often also are responsible for adapting to different power sources, such as 110V/60Hz (US) or 240V/50Hz (Europe). Other power supplies support USB connections or in-car cigarette lighter connectors for a power source, and may even have to "step up" the input voltage in order to produce the required output.

Answer 4

The power supply connected in a circuit helps to maintain a potential difference . Electrons move from one place to another if there is a difference in the concentration of electrons. The difference is maintained by the power supply. Because of this difference of concentration of electrons, the electrons move from a higher concentration to a lower concentration.

Answer 5

it helps it and heats it