I had five PCs runing 24 / 7 the Stanford Folding reseach program. This morning I found one of them had died in the night. The red wire on one of the Molex leads of the PSU had melted insulation. When the start button was pushed, the PC was turning itself off after half a second. I tried fitting a new PSU, it still turns itself off. I am going to throw the motherboard and old PSU away. Is it worth trying some of the other components in the other PCs, or do you think this would wreck them too? CPU AMD Phenom 9750 Memory 2 x 2GB DDR2 800MHz Hard drive 250 GB IDE Lightscribe DVD writer update 11pm: Thanks, Pookeyhead. Memory and hard drive checked and working.
If you can swap out parts to another one of your folding rigs to test them, sure... why would you throw away working parts? Drives, memory, CPU.. may all still be perfectly fine.
I wouldn't chuck anything except the PSU without testing it (obviously testing the PSU could be one of those mistakes you only make once) - just reinstall all the known-to-be-working bits on the motherboard, and borrow the cheapest PSU you've got from another of the Folding@Home machines to test it?
Yes chuck the PSU and test everything else before throwing it away. I think you will get most of it back if back.
