Glossary/System/Power delivery
Power delivery
Power delivery is the chain from the power supply through the motherboard's voltage regulators to the chip, and any weak link caps sustained performance.
Also known as VRM, power stage, PSU capability
Not measurable from a browser
A browser cannot read temperatures, power draw, fan speed, VRAM capacity, clock frequency or native FLOPS. For a direct reading use a native monitor such as HWiNFO64, GPU-Z or lm-sensors. SystemCheck contributes the other half: whether the condition is costing you throughput, measured as decay and consistency.
The chain has several stages: the PSU's rail capability and transient response, the motherboard's VRM phase count and cooling, and the connectors carrying it. Modern CPUs and GPUs draw large, extremely fast current transients (a GPU can spike to double its average draw for microseconds), and a supply that cannot follow those transients causes shutdowns even when its average wattage rating looks ample.
Symptoms of inadequate delivery are distinctive: shutdowns or reboots specifically under heavy combined CPU and GPU load, clock drops on a board whose VRM heatsinks are too hot to touch, or instability that appears only after a GPU upgrade. Average power ratings hide all of it.
SystemCheck cannot measure power draw, rail voltages, or PSU behaviour. Browsers have no access to any of it. If you suspect a power problem, use HWiNFO64 for package power and rail readings, and test with a known-good supply. SystemCheck's decay measurement will show the performance cost, but attribution needs hardware monitoring.
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