Possible to hook up PSU incorrectly?

[tobinlam]

I bought a CoolMax v600 from Fry's the other day and ran into a couple of strange issues. When I first hooked it up, I plugged in whatever plug was closest and would fit. I have not found any instructions that specify which set of wires should be plugged in. The PSU has a set for SATA and two wire sets with standard plugs and, like I said, just plugged in whatever was close. When I first booted the machine, it stayed on the BIOS splash screen for over a minute than started up normally. Over the next couple days I had issues with the Windows boot device not being found 3 out of 4 times or so and I noticed the DVD drive wasn't showing up at all in My Computer or the Device Manager. I opened up the computer and redid the wiring and put everything I could on a single wire set, not using the second set of standard connectors at all. Now the computer functions as it should. Did I miss something or is the PSU malfunctioning?

 

[saaiello]

You probably just had a loose connection the first time, sometimes those sata power connectors dont sit on the drive tightly and would result in the drive getting no power. Those 2 sets of standard connections all come from the same part of the PSU they are no different so it had to be just a loose connection. Your splash post screen stayed up for a little longer because it couldn't find the CDROM drive and was probably searching for it.

 

[jsc]

If you do not force the plugs, it's pretty difficult to hook up the PSU incorrectly. The biggest problem is with the 4 and 8 pin CPU plugs and the 6 and 8 pin PCIe graphics power plugs. They are wired differently. Plugging any of these in the wrong place will result in shorting 21 volts to ground.

When that happens, the PSU should sense the short circuit and electronically shut itself down before damage occurs. This is more likely to happen with a high quality PSU than with a low quality one (one very good reason not to scrimp on the PSU).

What I suspect happened is that one of the plugs wasn't inserted all the way.

 

[Thadius856]

It's typically not possible to hook up a PSU incorrectly because each cable is keyed to only go in one specific connector, one way.

You either had a loose 7-pin data cable or loose power cable.

 

[tobinlam]

You probably just had a loose connection the first time, sometimes those sata power connectors dont sit on the drive tightly and would result in the drive getting no power. Those 2 sets of standard connections all come from the same part of the PSU they are no different so it had to be just a loose connection. Your splash post screen stayed up for a little longer because it couldn't find the CDROM drive and was probably searching for it.

That's exactly what I thought. I forgot to add that I did unplug everything and plug it back in exactly as it was just in case it was a loose connection but that didn't fix anything. I did figure out that the DVD drive was causing the slow boot.

 

[tobinlam]

BTW, you guys are fast. That's awesome.

 

[Thadius856]

No problems. Don't forget to select a best answer. We do love our brownie points.