TL;DR at bottom So playing a round of BF4 Tuesday night when suddenly my whole system powers down. Desk lamp still on so not a power cut, I blinked at the same as the power down so not 100% sure if there was a brown out. Anyway I turn to my left to see if there's smoke and I catch a glimpse of an ember floating down from around the PSU. (EDIT:I suppose it as like a welding spark. Yellow hot but slowly floating down) I let it get to windows logging in/loading the desktop partly through disbelief and not wanting to corrupt OS (5 secs anyway, SSD Cheesecake). Yanked the plug and started sniffing around. Smelt like it was coming from the PSU. It was 1:30AM so I figured it was bedtime. In the morning there was no smell. Unscrewed PSU. Gave it a good sniff, asked my folks to sniff it in case I was nose dead and they couldn't smell it either. Stuck my head as deep as I could into the case and couldn't smell anything. I reckon it was the PSU since it was starting to whine for a long time. I don't want to pull the board out to shove my nose in it properly. The only things I see that could go wrong with the mobo in that region are the caps or MOSFETS. Can solid caps blow? Now this is stabbing in the dark but the potentiometers to regulate the CPU fans dangle in that area too. But I shoved them up my nose this morning and no smell. What do you guys reckon? TL;DR Play BF4 PC go night-night I go 'eh?' PC go Elloooo Me looky at PC See pretty light float down Me go 'uh-oh' Me pull plug Me smell PC PC bum bum no smell good Me go night night Light light Open PC Take out Big Black........BOX Smell Big Black ... Box No smell? Smell inside case No smell Smell CPU giblets No smell . Helpy?
I love these.. Made me laugh.. anyway back on topic.. have you tried another PSU?? If so, the one you took out is probably borked.. Not sure... You better grab another PSU if you got some lying around and test to make sure everything is all ok in there.
Got a PSU tester? It could be a cooked insect (I've seen that happen before - toasted crane-fly), but could also be the PSU...
I just finished the cable management in the other PC two weeks ago =( Hopefully it's just an insect. There was a spider not too long ago crawling up the wall. I left it because I was playing something at the time. Then it laid eggs in the ceiling rose. For two months now I've been having babies dangle in front of my face every so often. Puts an added meaning to "kill it before it lays eggs" for me. Any recommendations or are they all the same rebranded chinese stock? Does a PSU tester check using loads? Otherwise I could check if it's still in within ATX specs with a multimeter.
Slightly off topic but I once plugged in a 8800GTX that someone found in a skip, as soon as I switched it on sparks flew everywhere from it, much like a welder but hundreds of them. PC worked fine again when I put my 9800gtX+'s back in.
So an update on this story. I tested my Silverstone PSU with two IDE HDD's plugged into it and all the voltages were still well within tolerance. Left it running for 2hrs occasionally checking the voltages and they were still fine. I got a Thermaltake Dr.Power II PSU tester yesterday and tested with that also. Passed all tests including the 'Power Good' which I wasn't able to test with my tools. This was late and I was doing it not too long before going to bed. Just before I left I figured I may as well test the Hiper PSU that I nicked out of the living room PC and was currently powering my PC. By the way my components seem ok. Getting back on track the Hiper PSU failed on 5V. The tester just beeps a red F at me so I went and stuck my multi-meter into a connector and lo and behold it was 4.3V (below the ~4.75 minimum). I thought to myself that maybe the tester isn't giving the PSU enough load (it should do, it's a damn PSU tester) so I plugged in two HDD's to the PSU along side the tester and still it failed. But plug the PSU into a full system and measure 5V anywhere you like and it's within spec (5.1v). Any advice?
