Psu failed to start up and then blew!

[assassinsat]

hey guys,

just bought a gtx 560 and a 500w psu for that today. both from axle. its not a popular brand i know but it is quite popular here in sri lanka. anyway when i got home and connected the psu only to see if it works, it failed to start up. a few more tries and i saw that the cpu fan and casing fan starts up everytime just for a second. then i went and adjusted the voltage controls in the psu by a moment of stupidity and it just sparked and blew with white smoke! what happened. i mean i can understand why it blew in my face. but why did it fail to start up earlier?

i run an i3 2100 with 2 gb ram, intel dh61ww mobo. only other components are a 500gb hd which i dont know the brand and samsung dvd writer. i ran an hd 5450 with a powerlogic 450w psu earlier. i connected it again now to see if any of my components are damaged.thankfully everything works.

 

[13thmonkey]

the quality and ability of psu's depends on the brand. Its possible that the 500W psu was simply Dead on Arrival.

 

[casualbuilder]

It was a bad PSU to begin with, and then you messed with it. Replace the PSU, and hopefully you have no other problems. Dont buy that junk though, no matter how popular it is where you live. Big names are big names for a reason, especially when they are big names on techie sites!

 

[assassinsat]

right. i'm thinking of a seasonic S12II 520W now. hopefully that will work. will that be good enough?

problem with big names in techie sites is that those big names do not ship to countries like ours. and even when they do they only ship one or two models which cost nearly 3 or 4 times what this psu cost me. so its hard not to go for something like this especially when almost everyone around me recommended it. anyway my trust in them was broken badly lol. thanks for the replies guys.

 

[casualbuilder]

personally, i think it is, however, i would suggest going with the 620W version.

 

[beenthere]

If you want to objectively, accurately and scientifically determine what PSU power is required for your Vid card and PC in both watts and 12v rail amps., the forum Utility link below will show you how easy it is to calculate this information and objectively determine which PSUs are quality built, reliable PSUs that can meet your needs. Be advised that the available 12v rail amps. is just as important as the total PSU wattage. You need both to be correct.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/314712-28-please-read-determine-power-required

 

[assassinsat]

like i said there is no 620w seasonic available. the only other option is a silverstone strider 600w. any reason you are telling me to go to 620w?

 

[casualbuilder]

headroom. you should be fine with the 520W, as i said, it has plenty of power, but a 620W is more versatile for later on if you want to upgrade

 

[stingstang]

It might not have been the PSU. If it started up at all, even for a second, that could mean your RAM isn't correctly seated, or the 24 pin psu cable attached to your motherboard isn't all the way connected.

 

[mmaatt747]

Assassinsat,

I had the exact problem you did when I built my new PC from scratch (minus the voltage changing, I didn't mess with that). I exchanged my PSU at the store for another that was the same exact model and it started fine after that. I even had purchased a quality PSU but it was still Dead on Arrival as 13thmonkey mentioned above. Even so, I would still purchase only quality psu's as they are so important.

I can't say for sure that the psu is the problem in your case, just that the sympoms you were experiencing were exactly the same. Both my CPU fan and case fans spun up for just a second and then stopped. This would happen every time I hit the power button.

 

[assassinsat]

620W is more versatile for later on if you want to upgrade

are you saying that maybe i upgrade to an i5 it will not be enough? what about an OC'd i5 and gtx 560? how much power would that need?

It might not have been the PSU. If it started up at all, even for a second, that could mean your RAM isn't correctly seated, or the 24 pin psu cable attached to your motherboard isn't all the way connected

impossible i would think. coz the thing i did when it didnt work when i connected it was to check all the connections over and over again. i dont think that could have been an issue. and why would the ram stop the whole pc from starting?

I had the exact problem you did when I built my new PC from scratch (minus the voltage changing, I didn't mess with that). I exchanged my PSU at the store for another that was the same exact model and it started fine after that. I even had purchased a quality PSU but it was still Dead on Arrival as 13thmonkey mentioned above. Even so, I would still purchase only quality psu's as they are so important.

I can't say for sure that the psu is the problem in your case, just that the sympoms you were experiencing were exactly the same. Both my CPU fan and case fans spun up for just a second and then stopped. This would happen every time I hit the power button.

thats exactly what happened. are you saying that psu dead on arrival are common? my next one better not be. or i'll be really mad at someone lol. just out of curiosity, does anyone know why it only starts the fans for a second and then dies? if its broken it shouldn't work at all ryt?

 

[mmaatt747]

are you saying that psu dead on arrival are common? my next one better not be. or i'll be really mad at someone lol. just out of curiosity, does anyone know why it only starts the fans for a second and then dies? if its broken it shouldn't work at all ryt?

I can't be the one to tell you if it's common or not. I've only built 3 computers in my life time and this happened on my 3rd build. Also, the only reason I was able to determine so easily that it was a PSU problem was that I used one of the PSU's from one of my other PC's. It had less wattage then my new build PSU but that didn't matter since I left my GPU disconnected so I was not worried about it not being able to supply enough power. I just wanted to see if my new PC would power on with a different PSU, and it did. It's tougher and more time consuming to determine this if you don't have a spare lying around.


As for why it partially spun up the fans in the beginning (instead of not working at all) I have no idea. My guess there was just a minor component malfunction within the PSU that kept it from supplying full voltage/wattage. Most modern motherboards can detect this and immediately power off to protect themselves.

 

[stingstang]

Windows startup is composed of thousands of lines of 1s and 0s. If even one of those isn't the number it's supposed to be, your computer won't start up the right way. Same deal with hardware.
But, since you checked the connections, I would agree that it was a psu problem.

 

[Raiddinn]

At the moment you turn the computer on, everything max draws for just a second. If that is more juice than the PSU can give out, then the PC will show signs of life for 1 second and then shut everything down again.

I just had this happen to me. I had an old no-name PSU that had big numbers on it (I knew less then than I do now) and it worked for a long time, but eventually it couldn't even put out enough for that initial second of max draw and I would have to hit the power button 30 times for it to come on. Afterwards I wouldn't be max drawing everything so it would stay on then.

I replaced it with a new name brand PSU (XFX) with a lower wattage and the first time I hit the power button it came immediately to life with no problems.

So the reason for my problem was that I was using a PSU that wasn't good even from the factory combined with normal wear and tear over a long period of time and that was too much for it.

Note, it doesn't hurt to go higher wattage on name brand PSUs because even they suffer from wear and tear if you plan to keep them for multiple years. Capacitors age regardless what company soldered them onto the circuit board.

Room to upgrade in the future is obviously another benefit.

In other news, if you didn't use the separators that keep your motherboard from touching the side of the case, that would also keep your computer from ever starting. It would show the same symptoms as I described above (except even after 30 times pushing the power button it wouldn't come on). If you aren't using those then it will never turn on for more than 1 second.

- Edit - I have received and setup over 100 DELLs in the past in an employment capacity and setup a dozen computers both from pieces and ready made computers on the personal side. I have seen quite a few DOAs, but I wouldn't even call it as high as 5%. Maybe 2 or 3% of equipment I have bought or my organization has bought were DOA. I wouldn't assume that DELLs are somehow more resilient than other computers either, if anything most other people tend to find them worse in my experience. I find them to be pretty average and I would guess that the DOA estimate from before was about average too. If you are buying equipment from generic sources, though, that number can be far higher. DELLs aren't great, but at least they tend to not be tremendously bad either.

If you are sticking with name brand components (Seasonic, Intel, AMD, Cruicial, etc) the 2-3% DOA rate will probably apply to you. That is for the whole computer as well, individual parts like the PSU and Motherboard are the lions share of that, but not like 2 - 3% each.

 

[assassinsat]

At the moment you turn the computer on, everything max draws for just a second. If that is more juice than the PSU can give out, then the PC will show signs of life for 1 second and then shut everything down again.

I just had this happen to me. I had an old no-name PSU that had big numbers on it (I knew less then than I do now) and it worked for a long time, but eventually it couldn't even put out enough for that initial second of max draw and I would have to hit the power button 30 times for it to come on. Afterwards I wouldn't be max drawing everything so it would stay on then.

I replaced it with a new name brand PSU (XFX) with a lower wattage and the first time I hit the power button it came immediately to life with no problems.

So the reason for my problem was that I was using a PSU that wasn't good even from the factory combined with normal wear and tear over a long period of time and that was too much for it.

Note, it doesn't hurt to go higher wattage on name brand PSUs because even they suffer from wear and tear if you plan to keep them for multiple years. Capacitors age regardless what company soldered them onto the circuit board.

Room to upgrade in the future is obviously another benefit.

In other news, if you didn't use the separators that keep your motherboard from touching the side of the case, that would also keep your computer from ever starting. It would show the same symptoms as I described above (except even after 30 times pushing the power button it wouldn't come on). If you aren't using those then it will never turn on for more than 1 second.

- Edit - I have received and setup over 100 DELLs in the past in an employment capacity and setup a dozen computers both from pieces and ready made computers on the personal side. I have seen quite a few DOAs, but I wouldn't even call it as high as 5%. Maybe 2 or 3% of equipment I have bought or my organization has bought were DOA. I wouldn't assume that DELLs are somehow more resilient than other computers either, if anything most other people tend to find them worse in my experience. I find them to be pretty average and I would guess that the DOA estimate from before was about average too. If you are buying equipment from generic sources, though, that number can be far higher. DELLs aren't great, but at least they tend to not be tremendously bad either.

If you are sticking with name brand components (Seasonic, Intel, AMD, Cruicial, etc) the 2-3% DOA rate will probably apply to you. That is for the whole computer as well, individual parts like the PSU and Motherboard are the lions share of that, but not like 2 - 3% each.

well i'm pretty sure this psu can handle my system's max power. I'v seen that same model run an i5 with a gtx 560 ti. That plus the fact that my gpu wasn't even connected means this was DOA i gez. Well i hope the seasonic is better though. And my older powerlogic psu after reconnecting worked fine. So the mobo-case thing isn't an issue either.

My problem i wanted to clarify in this thread was if something i did initialy (before changing the voltage) made it impossible to power up. I guess this means that wasn't the case?

 

[Raiddinn]

I quickly checked for a review of an Axle PSU that included use of an oscilloscope and didn't find one quickly, nor could I quickly find a review from a site I trust to do reviews, so I can't really vouch that it is a high quality PSU.

If you say it is, then you trust it more than I do.

If you can't even run it without the video card, it may very well be DOA. In any event, I think you will probably have better luck with the Seasonic PSU instead.

I doubt you did anything wrong before you even started it up.

I didn't do anything different with my old PSU from when it was working to when it wasn't. I just bought it off ebay, used it for like 1.5 years, then the PC wouldn't turn on out of nowhere after turning it off one day. I replaced it and everything worked after that.

 

[assassinsat]

Best answer selected by assassinsat.