Question I heard a zap from my PC, should I be worried?

[thekonkey]

[Moderator edit to break up a solid paragraph of text.]

I'll try to be short but descriptive.

PC was off but connected to the wall and switch on the PSU on, and then suddenly I hear a zap sound that came from direction of my PC (maybe not from there though, but it seemed like that was the case, the sound definitely was there, like a fraction of a second long electric zap), and lights in the room just flickered for like a minute with just one-two flicks every twenty seconds or something like that.

This has not happened to me before so I don't have a clue what to expect, but that zap sound from the direction of my PC scared me and I'm currently paranoid about it. What happened seems to be a short circuit due to the sound and lights in the room flickering, but then pretty quickly everything came back to normal. I didn't notice any smell of burnt stuff from my PC, I even deliberately tried to sniff it from like 5 centimeters away and still didn't notice anything.

I turned my PC on, ran a graphical test for a minute on it, checked if all of my components are recognized by the system and everything seems to be completely fine, no performance decrease, no instability, visual errors, random shutdowns or other stuff like that so seemingly everything is completely fine.

But I checked it several hours ago and can't check it right now but will be able to check it in a few hours, for more extensive period of time because I want to play a game on it while possibly recording it as well.

See, I'm paranoid and now worry that something might just happen out of the blue because of what happened today, y'know, like PC just suddenly starts malfunctioning, kinda like when a person is exposed to a carcinogen but the actual cancer starts only long time after the fact.

BTW, I don't have a UPS, I wanted to buy one but it's not very financially possible for me right now, so besides whatever built in protection my PSU might have, there's nothing that would've protected my PC.

I tried to Google what possible issues might arise from this kinda thing happening, they only have answers for those cases when a PC won't turn on which is thankfully not the case for me (so far anyway), but even though everything seems to work completely fine I'm very worried nonetheless.

Thus I wanted to maybe get some reassurance from you guys or know whether I should start saving up for a new PC or I'm fine and there's no reason to be worried.

My PSU if this is something that's important is Chieftec GDP-650C Gold and where I bought it it states that it has only OCP protection and I don't know if that's enough.

 

[bill001g]

It would be more likely that you had some issue with the power coming into your house. If the power supply shorted out bad enough to affect the lights something would be burnt up. The exact number will depend on what country you live in but a outlet can easily provide more than twice the 650 watts you power supply is rated at. A outlet can run at full load without affecting other devices. In most houses the lights are not even on the same circuit as the outlets in the same room. If you exceeded that much power something would not smell right.

Now a power surge coming into the house could have damaged the power supply. Many have surge protectors since these are very cheap. Those surge protectors may no longer be functional but they would have protected the rest of the power supply from damage.

I suspect you will be fine to use it. If you are concerned your only real option is to buy a new power supply. It will be a peace of mind thing more than anything else. Unfortunately it is impossible for a home users to test a power supply. There are also very few professional review sites that have the proper equipment to test power supplies so it is hard to find anything other than some of the very large and rather expensive brands tested.

 

[bill001g]

Note OCP means over current protection. It will turn off the power supply if your machine has a short or if say you put in a new video card that tries to take too much power. This is on the DC side it is not on power coming into the house. It kinda is like the circuit breakers in your house but between the power supply and the components in your machine. If it dimmed the lights it is on the AC side of the power supply so OCP does nothing.

 

[thekonkey]

It would be more likely that you had some issue with the power coming into your house. If the power supply shorted out bad enough to affect the lights something would be burnt up. The exact number will depend on what country you live in but a outlet can easily provide more than twice the 650 watts you power supply is rated at. A outlet can run at full load without affecting other devices. In most houses the lights are not even on the same circuit as the outlets in the same room. If you exceeded that much power something would not smell right.

Now a power surge coming into the house could have damaged the power supply. Many have surge protectors since these are very cheap. Those surge protectors may no longer be functional but they would have protected the rest of the power supply from damage.

I suspect you will be fine to use it. If you are concerned your only real option is to buy a new power supply. It will be a peace of mind thing more than anything else. Unfortunately it is impossible for a home users to test a power supply. There are also very few professional review sites that have the proper equipment to test power supplies so it is hard to find anything other than some of the very large and rather expensive brands tested.

Might have been a power surge, I live in Ukraine in an apartment building and when that thing happened I wasn't using much energy at all, just the usual, my fridge, my tablet charging and such, nothing crazy so maybe it was the neighbours or something external, I don't know. I don't have a surge protector as far as I know, my PC is plugged into extension outlet which is plugged into the wall directly and that's it. When I tested if the PC works a few hours ago, there were absolutely zero slowdowns in how it works, no visual anomalies or anything, it turned on nice and fast as usual, no weird stuff so I'm hoping that my components, PSU included, are fine, but as far as I know there's no way to tell for sure and this just bothers me so much as I'm prone to paranoia. Additionally, I haven't tested it's work for long, just a few minutes. Hopefully though it's fine, power surges happen somewhat frequently where I live and it's been fine so far. What really bothers me this time though is that zap sound that I heard. I have no idea what's up with that. It might be that it wasn't even from the PC but just from somewhere else but it was very audible and seemed like it came from the direction of my computer, but then that zap was very short and there was really no way to identify where exactly it came from so IDK.

 

[thekonkey]

Note OCP means over current protection. It will turn off the power supply if your machine has a short or if say you put in a new video card that tries to take too much power. This is on the DC side it is not on power coming into the house. It kinda is like the circuit breakers in your house but between the power supply and the components in your machine. If it dimmed the lights it is on the AC side of the power supply so OCP does nothing.

Good to know that, thanks