Hi, it's been a while since I last had a hardware problem so i'm kind of a bit rusty with it all. The problem is with my pc's PSU. It's a Thermaltake Toughpower 600w and maybe about 3 or 4 years old now. One night we ran out of power (we use a power key meter thing) during which I had the pc on sleep mode. When I went to turn it on the next day after restoring power to the house it wouldn't boot up . The standby light would come on the motherboard but no matter what I tried I couldn't get it to boot up or even get the fans to turn on, it was dead apart from the standby light. I bought one of those PSU testers that you plug into the PSU and it lights up to tell you if it's working or not and i tested it on an old 400w PSU to make sure it was working ok (it was) and then when I tried it on my faulty PSU it showed there was a fault with the -5v. I know it's usually best to replace faulty PSU's but i don't really know much about PSU's or what the -5v is for and i wanted to know if this could actually be fixed or just to learn a bit about it.
-5V rail was removed in(if I remember correctly) atx v1.2 specs. Have you tried booting with other PSU?
Thanks for the reply. No I havn't tried the other older PSU because it is only a 400w model and I think it came from a motherboard that used the old AMD Athlon CPU's. Like I said... it's old. Would this work on my PC's motherboard if I unplugged everything from it, just to test it? It's an asus P6T-SE (intel i7) .
Most important part of the computer: PSU. If it's damaged, buy a new one. Trying to fix that would be more trouble than it's worth. And if something is damaged in the psu. and you replace some component. who's to say that something else in it isn't about to let go and potentially damage your computer? What I would do if I suspected the psu. replace it. if the computer boots and works, great! If not, return the psu and keep troubleshooting.
yeah, I realise how important a decent PSU is and i know i'm going to have to get a new one, it's just that i don't really know much about PSU's as it's not really something you can mess with so i was just wondering if there were any fixes for it?(just to get it working until i get a new one) . I didn't know for example that modern PSU's don't use the -5v rail. Is this true? 'Cos when i use the PSU tester on the faulty PSU the -5v is the only led that doesn't light up and it doesn't beep either (which it does if everything is ok) Has anyone else used one of these testers with the green led's that correspond to each voltage? Does the -5v still light up even if newer PSU's don't use it? Or does the led stay off but the tester still beeps to signal that the PSU is fine? I was also wondering what the -5v is/was used for?
