Power button on case fried my motherboard?

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willyburns

willyburns

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Sep 10, 2014
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Hi, I have built a new PC and tried the system outside of the case to check everything was working and to update the BIOS and install Windows, all of which went fine. I then assembled the PC within the case (NZXT S340 Tempered Glass) and the power switch didn't work despite the motherboard (Asus Maximus VIII Formula) lighting up indicating everything was still okay. I moved the power switch front connectors to a different position according to the manual, and tried the power switch again, at which point the system made a frying buzz sound, as if shorting, and just went dead. I pulled everything out of the case and tried the system again and it was completely dead: no lights, power and reset switches on the MOBO doing nothing and not lit-up.

Does anyone think that the case could've have been the cause of this, and if so, what is your best guess as to why this happened? This stuff is really expensive and I really have no way of investigating what went wrong due to limited knowledge of this type of troubleshooting. It seems inconceivable to me that the least expensive part of the build was the one responsible for frying a £300 motherboard but logic indicates that this is the case (unintentional pun).

Also the power supply used was a Corsair 750W Platinum-rated PSU.

Any info would be helpful so as to try and avoid this happening in future if that's possible, i.e. is there any way to test whether a case is faulty/likely to destroy other components?

Thanks!
 
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FrEaKii

FrEaKii

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Dec 20, 2016
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A switch normally cant fry your Motherboard (as long as it's connected properly) because it only closes a circuit for a short amount of time (to give the system the command to power up). You might have connected it wrong or there was a short circuit by installing the motherboard in some kind of wrong way.
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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IF everything was connected properly, then your power button did not fry your motherboard, your mothebroard fried your motherboard.
The power button is a 2 wire momentary switch that allows electricity from one pin on the motherboard to flow to the other. Even holding the power button for a minute should not cause any harm to a mothebroard.

The light on the motherboard does not mean "everything is ok", it simply means that it does see power from a specific wire on the PSU.

Besides knowing if you installed your board with standoffs, would need to know how you originaly had your PC/Power button wired, and how you changed.
Wiring the power button to the wrong front header pins (like power+ and light+) could have caused issues, although should not have been board frying.
 
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willyburns

willyburns

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The standoffs were installed for an ATX board out of the box, which I checked the config of, and there nothing was wrong with their positions. The motherboard had power inside the case – as evidenced by the lighting on the board – before reconnecting the power switch front panel connectors.

The NZXT S340 does have a PSU shield which is made from steel, so could it be that the bottom of the board was touching this shield – perhaps one of the cables attached at the bottom?

I also had a Cablemods RGB strip with the Asus ROG cable attached to the case directly, so could that have caused the short?

Thanks for your responses!
 
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willyburns

willyburns

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Sep 10, 2014
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@Grandmaster, it appeared that there were two positions that the power switch could be positioned according to the manual but the first didn't provide power to the button so I switched to the second one which did provide power . . . briefly.
 
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