How many PSUs have you had give up the ghost?

[slitherjef]

I am only up to two die on me and that was before I paid attention to these power supplies. A while back, it was just an over looked feature of my PC, but now after doing some reading and losing cheapos, I now know, not to skimp.

So, I thought it would be interesting to see how many users out there have had a PSU give up the ghost. Me? I have had to replace 2 and I hope thats it. Both where taken out by the main system and both where cheap "included in the tower" I guess I got lucky, I still have the rest of my computer working fine.

First time I was sitting at my computer and it just rebooted. Came back to life, rebooted again then POP and black screen and some funny smell. I opened it up later and seen the two post from a capacitor as still soldered to the PCB but no capaciter, but traces of it about the inside.

The next time, I was watching a DVD with headphones on. I wanted to listen to the commentary so in the middle of the episode, I turn the commentary on and started the episode over. A few moments later the screen went black, lights where still on, but no one was home. I pulled the plug out to turn the lights off, back in with the plug and nothing but the status light on my motherboard was on. There was PSU #2 This PSU was pulled out of a PC we found near a dumpster 8O worked good for a while and I never really thought about it till it died

I know better now and have a decent one on the way.

So, any one else have a story of a PSU going out?

 

[jamesgoddard]

In 15 years of owning PC's, I have never had a PSU die.

I just have the kiss of death with HDD

 

[jetfx]

well just one but under special conditions, i had a celeron and a crappy mobo so i bulid a test system to learn to overclock, voltages etc, so the mobo has not in a case also the psu a crapy 350watts generic, i use a watercooling system. and i kinda forgot to close the tank cap 8O i turn it on and n small stream jumped from the tank to the psu, very small a little bigger than a drop, 1 sec later splat! :lol: all sparks n smoke, the mobo n cpu survive the adventure 2 more days until i fried them under a 50% oc on a pga 370 celeron lol 8O

 

[AdamBomb42]

I had one that was making like it was the 4th of July! :lol:

 

[jaguarskx]

In 15 years of owning PC's, I have never had a PSU die.

I just have the kiss of death with HDD

:lol: :lol: :lol:

I know what you mean.

Zero dead PSU in 10 years.

3 dead Maxtor hard drives in 2 years.

1 dead Seagate within 3 months.

1 Western Digital 160GB HDD with 30GB worth of sector errors within 9 months.

The infamous original IBM Deskstar (Deathstar) 75GXP 60GB going strong since 2000. No hic-ups.

 

[stefx]

I've had 4 PCs (besides my company-provided laptops and besides my Commodore 64 that I won't count in there as a PC lol!)

-486 dx2-66 in '90s: 4 years without a problem (generic PSU)
-P3 1000 MHz: 2 years no problem (generic PSU)
-P4 3.0GHz: 3 years no problem expect busted 9600XT twice (Sonata PSU)
-e6600 (current in sig) : 1 month no problem so far

Compared to laptops, desktops are very reliable (and it's easier to fix them... I tried opening a laptop once, only to realize it's pretty much one boad, plus the ram, CPU and HDD. not much to fix there)

 

[Obtuse]

My first PC I built with crappy tower + case combo died, that learned me to pay attention to PSUs. I've actually had to RMA 2 Antec smartpower PSUs b/c they would constantly emit a buzz as long as they were plugged in, I don't know if that counts as failing, but it has gone to show me that Antec's customer service is pretty on the ball about replacing them as soon as there is any problem.

 

[jsc]

I am supporting about a dozen company computers here - all relatively low spec white boxes built downtown with really cheap ($20 or so) generic PSU's. On the average I replace 1 PSU a year. Been lucky so far - no catastophic failures or fried motherboards.

john

 

[utaka95]

Never had one of mine burn out, but have replaced several Dell's and Emachines in friends and relatives computers.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

In 15 years of owning PC's, I have never had a PSU die.

I just have the kiss of death with HDD

:lol: :lol: :lol:

I know what you mean.

Zero dead PSU in 10 years.

3 dead Maxtor hard drives in 2 years.

1 dead Seagate within 3 months.

1 Western Digital 160GB HDD with 30GB worth of sector errors within 9 months.

The infamous original IBM Deskstar (Deathstar) 75GXP 60GB going strong since 2000. No hic-ups.

Were those drives getting good power? Thats what killed 3 of mine... idk if it was poor wiring or what, I just know if your hd isn't getting a perfect amount of power it will crap out on you in a matter of months.

 

[jaguarskx]

Were those drives getting good power? Thats what killed 3 of mine... idk if it was poor wiring or what, I just know if your hd isn't getting a perfect amount of power it will crap out on you in a matter of months.

Yep, the drives were getting good power from Antec, Enermax & Seasonic PSUs. Stable voltages with at most 3% variance on the 5v and 12v rails. The power distribution on the 12v rails were pretty much well balanced on the Seasonic S12 500 PSU and the amps drawn from the 12v rail(s) never exceed 75% of the maximum constant amperes for all three PSUs based on my calculations.

 

[doolittle]

Personally, only two, the first was a case-bundled generic 300w when I was overclocking a duron600, made it to 800Mhz and it blew up with a bang and puff of smoke from both the PSU and mobo (K7S5A). It even fried one of the circuit traces off near the votage regulators. CPU was dead too. Turns out to be an L&C unit.

The second was when I relocated my trusty celeron 300A@450Mhz & BH6 to a smaller tower (was retooling as a print server) and completely disregarded the power supply. It blew after 5mins and took out the mobo and cpu with it. L&C strikes again.

Death from OC - better to burn out than fade away? :twisted:

As far as hdd's, Maxtors have had some issues in the past few years at least 4 died on me compared to one seagate and one WD in the same timeframe.

On the job (unix admin) we try to get systems with hot-swap redundant power supplies, I recall seeing more hdd replacements over psu replacements 2 to 1 if not higher. I also recall performing at least 10 XP installs due to dead hdd's for customers as well and only one complained about WGA

 

[rwpritchett]

I've had two generic PSU's go on me, one with a spectacular POP!, the other with a wimper (PC randomly shuts off, increasing in occurance). I've also replaced a PSU in my mother's Dell Dimension. So far [/knocks-on-wood] I haven't had any failures with name brands such as Antec and Enermax.

Only hard drive I've ever lost was a Maxtor, which happened to be running on the fisrt failed PSU mentioned above, although it didn't crap out at the same time. Now that I think of it, maybe the two failures were related. I'm a WD & Seagate man now... I still use my 7 year old WD 40GB.

 

[Fulmar]

11 years of computing for me I've had the following hardware failures occur to me.

IBM Aptiva 1.6gb HD crashed after 1-1.5 years
PowerColor Geforce 2 GTS Pro died after 2 years
Opterite 52x24x52 CD-RW after a year.
Okia 500W Power supply out of my p4 system - laster 3 years before it started to fail.
Skyhawk 300W power supply lasted 4 years.
Toshiba 6x DVD drive lasted 4-5 years
Countless Case Fans

Never had a motherboard or anything else major blow up. Knock on wood.

 

[Wishjuh]

Well it happend last weekend during a LAN-party.... I had the BeQuit 600Watt PSU.. I was using it for 4 months now... but I quess the 12 hours non-stop gaming wasn't that good for my PSU... Suddenly My pc fell out... and My PSU was making a strange beeping sound... It never came to live again... I was happy that there was a local computer-store nearby who had a Coolmaster Igreen 600Watt PSU... So I bought that one (for a ridiculously high price) and I saved my LAN-party with it

So no BeQuit for me ever

 

[Bobsama]

We had an AMD K6/2 at 550mhz that put its own board in a coma. It burnt out some parts, though we replaced them and put it back in. The computer would occasionally fail to boot once or twice, increased to over 10 times you'd have to reboot it for it to load. I'm lucky we didn't actually kill the thing. It was out for a few days and now its back. in fact, i'm typing on it right now.

 

[AeroB1033]

I've always foolishly overlooked the PSU and just used one that comes with a case. Fortunately for me, it's never come back to bite me (yet). I've never had a PSU fail, though I've had random shutdowns and other problems I attribute now to poor PSU performance.

My next PC will include a high-quality separate unit. (Putting in the order this friday).

 

[archae86]

I've run an average of three PCs 24/7 at home for about the last ten years.

In that time I've had two clear cases of PSU failure.

One was sudden. I heard a noise, saw a puff of smoke coming out of the grill of the PSU, then a flash visible on that smoke. When opened the PSU had mere traces of one component. That was a generic cheap supply that came with the generic cheap case. No collateral damage so far as I know.

The other was annoyingly gradual. The first symptom was reluctance to cold boot (it would self power down after perhaps half a minute). I'd try again and it would go. As I normally run 24/7, this did not cause much problem, but after a couple months things got worse and the machine would self power-down in less than a minute no matter what I did.

As replacing the (Sparkle) PSU fixed the problem, I blame it. All those aborted startups seem to have left me with a few corrupted files (FAT32 Win98SE system).

Lastly, after recapping a motherboard with highly visible leaking capacitors, I opened the Antec Trupower which had run the system about three years. On seeing about three modestly bulged capacitors, I discarded it. I'm not counting this as a clear failure, but do count it a point of concern (and don't plan to use it again).

 

[joewho]

Have had two die.

1st was a Antec 350w

2nd was a Antec 480w

 

[sailer]

I've never had a psu die, and that even includes a couple from Aspire, which has been rated as a bad company. I don't know the exact reason, whether its because I usually buy a psu that is over rated for the job its doing or I've just been lucky.

I have lost a couple Maxtor hard drives, a MSI motherboard, an ASUS motherboard with a VIA chipset, a couple Intel motherboards and cpus, and a Nvidia graphics card.

One old computer had a IBM deskstar hard drive for 7 years before the computer died.

 

[clue69less]

So, any one else have a story of a PSU going out?

I've had three serious PS crashes out of about 50 builds. Two were Antecs that did significant damage. The other was a USA PS that cost something like $14 and wasn't worth it.

 

[pdhcentral]

I've never had a supply die on me, but I have some flakey encounters!!

I once bought a £20 supply! 400W! Sweet it was. I know that supplies are quality by the weight of them; this one weighted very little, about the wight of a CD or something! Lasted a good year, quite surprising!

Buy a good supply otherwise your HDD will hear about it! I'm not kidding, flakey supplies attack HDDs easily! :lol:

 

[Wishjuh]

I've never had a supply die on me, but I have some flakey encounters!!

I once bought a £20 supply! 400W! Sweet it was. I know that supplies are quality by the weight of them; this one weighted very little, about the wight of a CD or something! Lasted a good year, quite surprising!

Buy a good supply otherwise your HDD will hear about it! I'm not kidding, flakey supplies attack HDDs easily! :lol:

True... and the other aspect... is that cheap PSU's will not have a good Efficiency... so your energy bills will be higher...

 

[Twisted_Sister]

How long do you guys keep a PSU before replacing? 5 years?

 

[yakyb]

two psu's have blown in my four personal builds (non in the builds i have done for others)

they happened to have been my first two builds in which i used generic PSUS hmm i think i learnt my lesson so from now on ill buy decent PSUs

in fact ill probably get a galaxy 850 for my next build