What is a Computer Power Supply?

"Hi I'm Allen and welcome to Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to build your very own personal computer. This right here, power supply, you're going to need this operating your system. Now this power supply is just a basic ATX power supply, one of the original ones. So you'll see only a few connections on here, this connects to my ATX board. The newer power supplies actually have the ATX connection and it's called like a 12 volt power rail, it's another safety connection that they use to make sure you don't short things out. Here you have your normal drive connectors, this connector right here and your floppy drive connectors, the newer ones also have the SATA connectors which are little flimsy so be careful when you're plugging those in. Now the biggest thing there are a lot of brands out there for power supplies so do some research on them. I've seen ones from Flower to Pow-Max to a lot of Chinese import brands so definitely do your research depending on what you want to spend and make sure that the power, not consumption, but the power flow is, you know constant and everything, it has a constant power output you don't want too much fluctuation, or you really don't want any and all. And also when you look at these power supplies, you have to know the wattage and my recommendation is pretty much anywhere from 400 and above depending upon what you want to do. I stick with around 600 Watts and that way I can expand my system but 400 really should be good if you're running just a basic system, you know one drive, a hard drive in a CD drive and a couple components. 400 should really get you by, but if you really just you know want to spend the extra couple dollars then go 500 and up and you should really be fine. There is ones out there that have a thousand Watts, so I don't know what these people are running in their systems, but you know maybe something to do. Some of the companies I recommend, Cooler-Master makes some good drives, or power supplies I'm sorry, and also I use a company Ultra, they have a lot of power supplies out there, I haven't had any problems with them, they have really good rebates that you can find almost on all the sites. So check it out, this is definitely an essential part of your computer. The power supply or the PSU as you can always type it in online and find out more information. So right here this is a power supply, an essential part to building your own personal computer."