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PFC is 'Power Factor Correction. Unless you want to get into AC 2nd year power theory you can disregard it.
Power-Factor is quite a complicated concept to explain, but for the home user it has no tangible effect on anything, regardless of the powered unit.
The simplest way often used to describe it is to imagine a pint of beer. Now I lived in the North of England for many years, and up there, they're far humbler folk who like to pour their beer with at least a 2" head, heaven knows why it's just 'a thing.' In the beautiful South beer is poured with a very small head, we're more cultured like that.
Both of them are a 'pint of beer', one has a chunk of it that doesn't really get consumed, it normally slips down the glass, gets wiped up and returned to the bar, that's the reactive power element which PFC corrects for.
It's a bit more complicated than that, and it involves vector mathematics, but it's not worth worrying with in a domestic situation. It's a consideration if you're billed in VA - worldwide this is very unusual in domestic property and you'd need a lot of machines and a lot of UPSs at home to notice any difference even if you were billed for it, which you're almost certainly not.
In DC or unity-AC circuits (purely resistive, which is only a theoretical circuit) current and potential are locked together, peak potential and peak current occur simultaneously. What 'actually' happens in AC circuits is that the Potential and Current waveforms don't match, peak current and peak potential occur at different points in the 50/60Hz cycle. This has no effect on you as a home-gamer as you're still getting the same Power (useful energy that does work) and the device neither 'knows', nor 'cares' about this distinction. You're actually pushing and pulling a bit of un-used energy back and forth to your energy company though, it doesn't do anything useful. It's the 'head' on the beer.
Devices with lots of capacitors or inductors, due to the nature of reactance it follows they'll make the greatest impact. Things like SMPSs are loaded with these devices and by their nature have a 'poor' Pf.
This is allied to the reason why 'RMS' is such as useful distinction when discussing AC power components, it negates all of these notions away and just pretends the whole thing is a DC circuit, which is often a simpler way to conceptualise even tricky circuits, for most applications this is good enough.
Short version: Don't worry about Pf for your application, as previously demonstrated, your machine passively corrects for it anyway.
Last edited by RobustReviews; 04-21-2022 at 09:46 AM.
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