Was this PSU burn out caused by my Graphics card?

[precinct]

Hello folks, i'm afraid my first post is a tale of woe!

Hopefully you can see my set up in my sig!

My PC had been on for about 9 hours straight (downloading and about 2 hours playing HL2).
As i retired to bed i decided to watch an episode of 'Invasion' on the puter and set the DIVX file going. I fell asleep.

I woke up about 5 hours later and the monitor was displaying a mess of garbled colours and patterns. I rebooted to be greeted by a black screen with what looked like white cursors all over it. A third reboot brought about a blank screen, no POST but all fans whirring away. The mobo green light was on so i tried again. This time there was no activity from the master HDD (IDE). The SATA was spinning nicely.
I carried on rebooting with diminishing returns (at one point the master HDD started to spin only when the IDE cable was disconnected!?)
Eventually the power switch wouldn't even get the fans whirring. The green mobo light remained on, however.

My HDD's are fine (thank the lord) and working on my girlfriends PC (im using them at the moment).

After leaving my PC unplugged for about an hour i started it up with basic components (Radeon, mem stick, cpu) and the beeps and POST all worked fine.
(although ive never seen a POST or any text relating to the X800 during boot up ever, why is that?)

Anyhow, to troubleshoot, i removed one component at a time and rebooted getting all the correct warnings ( NO MEM etc).

When i finally removed the PSU i noticed that pin 11 (with one orange and one brown wire attached to it) was slightly burnt. Luckily there was no similar damage to the corresponding connector on the MOBO. The PSU was obviously still working but i decided to take no more chances and left it disconnected.

My first step tomorrow will be to buy a replacement (and more powerful) PSU, but beyond that i am completely stumped. I cant use my girlfriends PSU for testing as it doesnt have the 4-pin, 12 volt plug need to boot the mobo. My system is hardly power hungry, the Zalman should have coped well. I was told that plugging the PSU's 20 pin plug into the mobo's 24 pin connector was fine.

The A8N mobo had given me boot problems before (missing NTLDR and HAL.DLL) but a bios upgrade and a reformat had my system running really smoothly.

Any ideas as to where this problem originated?

What else could be damaged?

I'd only just updated all the Catalyst software from the ATI site and theres a chance i may have set the refresh rate higher than the recommended limit for my monitor.

I've posted this in the Graphics card forum as well. I hope the powers that be don't mind!


Any ideas as to what my next step should be would be greatly appreciated.

Mike.


p.s. i use a Belkin surge protector for my all PC equipment.

 

[Grimmy]

I'm guessing power spike.

Power surge protector might help keep a system from being burnt up, but after a year, it becomes a reg 6 pack outlet...

Hard to say what power surges can take out.

I'd say just replace parts that you can, and see if the system is stable when it comes back up.

 

[precinct]

Thanks for your reply Grimmy. i've got some more questions.

What is the significance of just the one pin, (with the orange and brown wire attached) being burned?

Why did my PC turn on again (albeit minus the HDDs) after an hour or so?


Why was the date and time in BIOS set back to '00:00 January 1st 2005'?


Why was the monitor going crazy prior to the failure?
(my HDDs are fine and bootable etc on another system)

 

[Grimmy]

What is the significance of just the one pin, (with the orange and brown wire attached) being burned?

Oooph.. not sure about what orange/brown wire is.. I'm guessing it is a 3.3 v wire. If it was a power surge, electricity (power spike) will take the most easy route, and I guess that was it.

Not sure if anyone else could point out the significance of why.

Why did my PC turn on again (albeit minus the HDDs) after an hour or so?

If it is still workable, it will reset itself. Problem is, you can have a working power supply, but yet it may not be working at full capcity.

For example, a friend of mine said he had PC problems. Wanted me to check it out. He said it turns on, but no beep, no display. Turns out he had a power spike. I found that out when I took the memory out. It had a burn trace.

Now the PC turned on, but none of his 2 CD-Rom Drives would open, even though all fans - led lights were on.

Just because some things are working, won't mean that the power supply is working correctly.

Why was the date and time in BIOS set back to '00:00 January 1st 2005'?

Ooooph, well your bios battery may be dead. Might wanna replace it.

Why was the monitor going crazy prior to the failure?

That maybe due to the power supply again, not being able to supply the demand, and causes the it to pretty much go crazy, and then faint/fail.

 

[precinct]

Thanks again Grimmy. Im picking up a PSU tomorrow so i'll reassemble eveything and have another go.

Hope this isnt going to be too expensive. I'm buying a more powerful unit with a 24-pin connector this time and if this one burns!...

The thing with the BIOS battery has me suspecting my mobo again.

What a headache!