Power Supply Just Died w/ No Warning?

jitter77

Sunday evening my daughter was playing on the PC and it just shut off.  I goto turn it back on and the fans did like a half turn and nothing.  The MB still had the green light like it was getting power though.  I unplugged it, let it sit for like an hour and try again still nothing.  I took it out of the PC and tried to kick it on manually and nothing.  It was a thermaltake TR-2 600W  I do think it lasted 8+yrs,  I just thought it was odd for a PSU to die out of the blue w/ no warning.   I got a corsair cx650M and everything is working again. 

Ridelynn

I think you got lucky. In my experience, PSUs usually don't tell you they are sick. Instead, they go and randomly start killing off all the other parts of your computer one at a time.

I have seen a few just kaput, or explode, or both. But mostly, you find out you have a bad PSU only after you had bad RAM, bad hard drives, bad motherboards, etc.

jitter77

A guy in my bowling league gave me a pc to work on.   I took it home fired it up.  It made a loud pop and sparks shot out the back.   It had so must dust caked into it, i think it shorted it out.   Luckily nothing else got damaged

maskedweasel

Ridelynn said:

I think you got lucky. In my experience, PSUs usually don't tell you they are sick. Instead, they go and randomly start killing off all the other parts of your computer one at a time.

I have seen a few just kaput, or explode, or both. But mostly, you find out you have a bad PSU only after you had bad RAM, bad hard drives, bad motherboards, etc.

Thats bad luck,  I've had power supplies go out numerous times without any other components being damaged.  One time I actually had the power supply of one pc catch on fire.  

Asm0deus

maskedweasel said:

Ridelynn said:

I think you got lucky. In my experience, PSUs usually don't tell you they are sick. Instead, they go and randomly start killing off all the other parts of your computer one at a time.

I have seen a few just kaput, or explode, or both. But mostly, you find out you have a bad PSU only after you had bad RAM, bad hard drives, bad motherboards, etc.

Thats bad luck,  I've had power supplies go out numerous times without any other components being damaged.  One time I actually had the power supply of one pc catch on fire.  

Indeed I have repaired many devices, not just PC, that have power supplies that died and while it can damage other components it's not as sure to happen as some people here think.

When they are old like this they often just die without blowing other parts up or give advanced warning in that the PC will shut down for no reason then start back up after a few mins with increasing shut downs like this till poof dead for good.

For it to blow up other parts there has to be a surge caused by a short or somesuch that gets by the redundancies (voltage regulators, and other built in short protection, OVP etc etc) built into the PSU...obviously cheap PSU's are more likely to have this issue if the design is cheap and has cut corners in that area.

I would say like about 70% of the time a PSU will just die and your other parts will be fine.

Tiller

Had a corsair PSU last me 10 years....it finally died when I built my most recent pc and tried to use it. Believe it or not it died just as the 10 year warranty ended.

Ridelynn

My opinion:

A lot of hardware failures that aren't directly and obviously ~THE Power Supply~ are actually caused by poor quality and/or failing power supplies.

Most people assume just because the computer turns on the PSU is fine. A poor or failing power supply can wreck havoc on components - VRMs in GPUs, hard drives, and motherboards are particularly sensitive, because those are usually the first components in line from the PSU.

The PSU doesn't need to catch on fire to be bad. It doesn't even need to fail to turn on. All it needs to do is fail to regulate voltage properly, and it will start breaking other things... and if you don't think to check for it, you'd be none the wiser, replacing the broken component only for that replacement, or something else, to fail soon later on down the line.

Can I prove that? No. I can't. Not without some expensive testing equipment. But I've seen an awful lot of computers where Part A goes, and that gets fixed. Then a few weeks/months later Part B goes. Then Part C goes. And usually somewhere between B and C the owner decides the computer has just had it, and replaces the entire thing outright. Parting out the machine the rest of the components usually do ok - until the machine the PSU gets parted out to mysteriously starts doing the same thing. I've seen that trend a handful of times - enough to make me believe, but not enough to be able to offer any concrete proof.

I believe enough that I won't reuse a PSU from an older build any longer, and if I do a major upgrade of anything in a computer (major is relative, I would say that could be synonymous with "Expensive"), I'll replace the PSU as well if it's got any significant age to it just out of caution. In servers at work we swap HDDs every 3 years and PSUs every 5 years just because it's a lot cheaper than any downtime from failure.

Asm0deus

Ridelynn said:

My opinion:

A lot of hardware failures that aren't directly and obviously ~THE Power Supply~ are actually caused by poor quality and/or failing power supplies.

Most people assume just because the computer turns on the PSU is fine. A poor or failing power supply can wreck havoc on components - VRMs in GPUs, hard drives, and motherboards are particularly sensitive, because those are usually the first components in line from the PSU.

The PSU doesn't need to catch on fire to be bad. It doesn't even need to fail to turn on. All it needs to do is fail to regulate voltage properly, and it will start breaking other things... and if you don't think to check for it, you'd be none the wiser, replacing the broken component only for that replacement, or something else, to fail soon later on down the line.

Can I prove that? No. I can't. Not without some expensive testing equipment. But I've seen an awful lot of computers where Part A goes, and that gets fixed. Then a few weeks/months later Part B goes. Then Part C goes. And usually somewhere between B and C the owner decides the computer has just had it, and replaces the entire thing outright. Parting out the machine the rest of the components usually do ok - until the machine the PSU gets parted out to mysteriously starts doing the same thing. I've seen that trend a handful of times - enough to make me believe, but not enough to be able to offer any concrete proof.

I believe enough that I won't reuse a PSU from an older build any longer, and if I do a major upgrade of anything in a computer (major is relative, I would say that could be synonymous with "Expensive"), I'll replace the PSU as well if it's got any significant age to it just out of caution. In servers at work we swap HDDs every 3 years and PSUs every 5 years just because it's a lot cheaper than any downtime from failure.

Speaking as a retired repair tech here most times when the PSU goes it goes and you will notice odd behaviors if there any other issues before hand. For many peeps this will be when gaming especially on demanding games and sure you should have it checked and not just by "part swappers" that don't know what they are doing.

When doing a repair you need to understand why the parts that have gone bad went bad in the first place as  something caused the issues in the first place.

Sometimes it just bad design, sometimes it a one off case or power surge in the home lines or really bad luck and some component was faulty causing serious issues down the line.

I remember back in the day some vcr just had poor quality heads that wore out quicker than they should  and sometimes is was amateur techies "cleaning" the vcr and damaging it.  I am retired now but when I was in the thick of it you got to know the brands and their quirks and flaws.

What you are talking about is an outlier case that is not that common for most gamers and in home use.

Now if you are running a business sure it's a good idea to replace them every five years but for a gamer at home well depends on what you bought..if you are rocking a plat or gold PSU with a 10 year guarantee you most likely will be okay even 5 years in. If you are trying to reuse a crap PSU from a prebuilt well yeah not a good idea.

Like I mentioned the redundancies built into decent quality PSU's and the voltage regulators are not the things that tend to go with age.

Age tends to affect caps more than transistors and resistors.

Thing is PSU's go bad because something major happened to make it go bad (think shorts or a surge in your home power lines etc etc) or they are old and not holding up to their specs due to wear and tear which tends to affect electrolytic caps long before it will affect other internal components.

It also why when buying a PSU you want to buy one with more watts than you need so as it ages it will still run your system fine since it has some leeway to compensate for degradation.  You also can keep in mind a higher quality PSU will degrade less over time than some cheap junk you usually see in prebuilts.

I have rebuilt quite a few older audio AMPS for audiophiles and you would be surprised how good some of the old amps sound once you have done a complete recap.

Obviously this is just my opinion based on years of experience repairing vcr's, tv's both old crt and non crt ones, audio equipment, monitors etc.

Last thing I repaired was my son PC monitor.  He would turn on the screen and the power button would flash a few times before the screen would stay on and this progressively got worse until he was having to leave it on for a good 15mins before the screen would stay on.

I knew this this was an issue with the PSU board so I opened it up recaped about 5 of the electrolytic capacitors, as this a typical old caps issue, and poof works like new.

They hardly even showed signs of being bad too just a very, very slight swelling on the top of the cap.

It's the same thing when you are restoring old pinball/arcade/jukeboxes quite often they just need a good cleaning and recap.  Old arcades though often the issues is the crt tube in it which is more problematic nowadays.