Question Rosewill PSUs failing all at once after a few years of use?

[Justiceinacan]

Hi everyone.
I currently have two Rosewill power supplies, and I'm concerned about both of them.

Last month, one of the GPUs in my mining rig was wiped out by a Rosewill Quark. The unit also let out a loud & bright spark that scared the crap out of me. I chucked it in the bin and replaced it with a new corsair RMx and pressed F for my RX 470.
So, when my other Quark starts making this noise I got scared and impulse-bought another RMx because I don't want to lose my serverboard to another bad Quark.
Now, the Capstone 850-M in one of my desktops is making a more regular buzzing noise from time to time, and it seems to not be dependent on load (sometimes it happens at idle, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it happens at full load, sometimes it doesn't). I'm worried about that one as well because it's been in that rig for some time now and the Quark that wiped out the GPUs was making a similar buzzing noise.

I bought all three PSUs a long time ago (at least 4-5 years, but I forget exactly when) because they scored high on the PSU tier list we used to have here, and also they scored well on Jonnyguru. I'm a bit worried now though because all my Rosewill units are having issues all at once here. Do you think I should look into replacing that Capstone too or is an occasional buzzing noise normal? I've heard that degrading coils will vibrate more, into the audible frequency range, and another effect of aging components is that voltages may grow out of spec. I also question whether the PSU protections will be functional after 5 years of daily use (in the Capstone) or 24/7 use (in the Quark).

I'd like to hear what you all have to say. Thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Both the Quark and Capstone series have five year warranties. If they have failed and you have proof of purchase, RMA them. No amount of buzzing is really normal or acceptable. It happens, but that doesn't mean it should or that you should put up with it if it is still under warranty.

If it is not under warranty, then I'd replace it. It's not worth having to replace another graphics card over especially since power supplies are generally much cheaper even for really decent ones.

The RMx units you're getting are pretty good.

If you've gotten four or five years of 24/7 usage, or even daily heavy usage out of them, then I'd say they've probably lived up to their end of the bargain.

 

[Mezoxin]

i dont think there is any PC component that is designed to withstand the 24/7 loads of minning , quality PSU though with proper working protections not just meaningless lables on the spec sheet would probably have a better chance of dyng a peacefull death

 

[4745454b]

Did the Quark ever score high? I had the original capstone myself. 450W. Powered my 3770K and R9 280/7950 just fine. I only lost it because my town burned down.

I said original capstone because those were the Superflower Leadex platform. I think they eventually switched to someone else, CWT?, and didn't change the name. The original ones had a 10yr warranty I think. The other ones were a lot less. As mentioned above if you used a PSU for 24/7 mining and got 5yrs out of it that's probably all you can hope for. If you are worried about a capstone PSU in your personal rig I'd check which one you have. If it has a 7-10yr warranty and it's making noise it might be returnable.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, the Quark scored well. It was, and is, considered one of the few Rosewill units with decent quality.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9928/the-rosewill-quark-series-psu-review/5

Rosewill Quark 1000W Power Supply – Page 6 – JonnyGURU.com

www.jonnyguru.com

If it is a Capstone "M", then it is made by Superflower, unless something has changed since the last time I looked into it. Been that way for years.

 

[DSzymborski]

I believe the later generations of Capstones were made by Enhance, who predictably did a sloppier job.

 

[Justiceinacan]

Hmmmm so that's tough. It was a Capstone 850M, to clarify. It had a 5 year warranty, and it's months out of warranty unfortunately.
I'll get around to replacing it soon. This unit is in one of my personal rigs - not a miner or server, but I still care about the components inside so I suppose it's worth doing. It'll also be easier to do, as this rig shouldn't need any more than a solid 550W unit to get the job done, the power consumption of the rig now is less than 400W max.

 

[Darkbreeze]

What are the full specs of the rig it is in, out of curiosity?

 

[Karadjgne]

Curious, what kind of buzzing sound? There's the kind electronics make, like relays that get stuck or go bad, and there's the kind fans make when there's a 'clean' spot on one blade after a chunk of dirt/debris has eventually worked loose. It's surprising just how many ppl say they thoroughly clean a pc, and might actually do so on a regular basis, and totally forget there's a filter underneath the pc as well.

Just out of further curiosity, since this has been an ongoing 5 year (ish) trek, has the mining actually paid off? On things like the electric bill, + pc costs vs profits? (don't have to answer, if you don't want to)

 

[Darkbreeze]

and totally forget there's a filter underneath the pc as well.

On SOME cases, not all, or even most. But it's definitely good to know if yours does or does not and if it does, to clean it regularly. Seems like a no brainer, but you'd be surprised how many people actually ARE no brainers in some regards and completely forget about that filter OR about cleaning the PSU out with compressed air, at all.

Could also be a bearing issue, or any number of issues, but having already lost one graphics card, and there being potential for loss of motherboard, CPU, memory and storage devices with any disfunctional power supply that is old enough to where protections don't actually kick in the way they were intended, or for failure on a unit at five years that is admittedly "months out of warranty" already, I'd replace it even if the fact was that the noise was being created because of something minor. Simply not worth the risk to the rest of the hardware IMO, at least if the other hardware is still valuable to you.

 

[Justiceinacan]

Full rig specs:
FX-8350 @ 4.5
990FXA-UD3 R1.0
4x4GB 1866 MHz
Storage : 1 TB 7200RPM, 500 GB SSD, read/write optical drive
GPU : GTX 1060-3GB
CPU and board have been with me not long after they first hit the shelves. This rig is in my workspace so I use it for web browsing but also playing games sometimes. It dual boots Win7 or Win10 which is handy for old games that don't work right on Win10 but I'm too scared to pirate, like the original nfs most wanted (my "real PC" is based on a Z370 board that doesn't support Win7 and USB devices don't even register on it). But it's also decent at most of my other games because I don't own too many recent titles.

The PSU is actually top-mount and there is no filter there. Although I haven't cleaned it in a while, I suppose I should get a better look at it.

Just out of further curiosity, since this has been an ongoing 5 year (ish) trek, has the mining actually paid off? On things like the electric bill, + pc costs vs profits? (don't have to answer, if you don't want to)

That Quark wasn't used for mining all 5 years, it was used in yet another personal system but I chose to reuse it for the mining rig back in ~2017 because it appeared to be in good shape. All 5 of my GPUs are Radeon RX 470/480/570 undervolted with BIOS mods, but I didn't get all 5 at once, I auction-sniped each one off eBay for less than $80 each (most came in early 2018 when the market really crashed), so the gain in hashing power and electrical costs came gradually. Motherboard was reused too, bought an Asus P8Z68-V Pro with dead RAM slots real cheap. A bit janky, but it worked okay. The RX 470 that got wrecked I think can be attributed to the Quark PSU, because had the RAM given up or whatever, I think the lights and fans would still work, but it's totally lifeless. Also the Quark PSU blew up right after I discovered it was dead, so I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
I did the math (and of course the market sucks right now but at the time) I was turning like 20% profits after electricity on Ethereum but not factoring hardware costs, so I still haven't broken even yet, but I'm not bleeding money. I started mining mostly as a project, not really with money as the primary goal but more about learning how crypto works. I started with Monero (which is now on a CPU bound algo), but moved up to Ethereum a couple months later, although I'm skeptical of the future of Ethereum so I'm not sure where to go next, if I go anywhere. I respect Ethereum Classic but earnings : power costs puts me in the red. I like the concept of RavenCoin but they have problems with ASICs on the network and really sketchy price patterns (insider trading) as of late. I might put em away for now and come back in a few months.

 

[Karadjgne]

That's probably one of the most honest answers I've seen in a long time, thank you. Maybe for Xmas Santa will drop you a coin.

Good luck with this. 🍀

 

[Zizo007]

I stopped mining Monero on the GPU and CPU a couple years ago, its not worth it anymore as you make much more money by trading bitcoin, also it damaged my 3 well cooled 280X. Trading bitcoins even makes more money nowdays than ASIC miners like the Ant miner. The share difficulty has increased a lot.

Never use a cheap PSU for mining. I used a Seasonic Prime 1200W Gold since it came out and never had a single problem, it came with a 12 year warranty. I had Antec PSUs sparking and damaging system components, I learned my lesson.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Funny thing is, most of those decent Antec units ARE made by Seasonic and are built on respected Seasonic platforms. There are a few of their platforms supplied by Delta as well, which are also pretty good. The number of units Antec sells or has sold that are poor quality, are somewhat fewer, but definitely there, but it's just another reason why you DO NOT pick a power supply based on who makes it, you pick it based on reviews of the unit OR on the platform, if it is a known good platform. Model specific reviews are better though because in some cases the implementation of a certain platform by one brand is no on par with a different implementation of the same platform by the manufacturer or another brand. Super Flower Leadex II are terrific. EVGA G3, based on that platform, are not as good. There are, if we look, many more similar examples of that out there.