Last night while I was working on a completely different station, my main workstation had a failure. I heard a loud pop and there was a blue flash. Now the system won't power up at all. No hint of power or even a pulse.
I gave the motherboard a thorough visual inspection and saw no burn marks or swollen/exploded capacitors. I then looked at the power supply, an 700W OCZ ModXstream Pro. I can't see much due to its covering and I don't want to remove the cover because that voids the warranty, but I didn't see any obvious signs of damage and there was no burning smell.
However, and its a big however, when I pulled the power supply out and turned it sideways, a small piece of an IC component popped out with the main part number of TNY278PN. According to the web pages I found this describes the component:
Here are my questions:
■ This may seem obvious but I like to be careful. Is it safe to say that the PWM controller popped and that the power supply is the fault?
■ How likely is it that the motherboard or other components got damaged? I read on the web that symptoms like mine usually indicate a "primary" side failure and that does not usually damage the rest of the system, but I'd like to get some more opinions.
■ What are the odds that one of the system components caused the failure due to a short and the PSU popping was a secondary failure and not the root cause? This is the big question of course because simply hooking up another power supply will be fruitless.
■ Are there any tests, checks, etc. you would try if you were in my shoes, besides trying a new power supply?
■ I'm going to hit OCZ up for a replacement, but I still wouldn't want to risk harming my main system in the future if this is a common occurrence with that line. Would you stick with OCZ or switch to perhaps Antec or Corsair? I've heard good things about Antec but I've also seen several noise complaints about some of their units too.
Note, this system worked fine for nearly 2 years without incident. Also, much to my dismay, because I thought I researched the PSU pretty thoroughly before I bought it, a Google search for "OCZ loud pop blue flash" turns up a disturbing number of similar reports by other users with the OCZ line. The problem of course is that I didn't think to use those keywords in my initial search. I will next time.
Also, according to my calculations, this PSU was actually overkill for the system which contains a P7P55D motherboard, two standard SATA hard drives, a common low-end ATI graphics card that doesn't require its own power, and about 4GB of RAM. Hardly a power hungry gamer's system or the like by any measure.
I gave the motherboard a thorough visual inspection and saw no burn marks or swollen/exploded capacitors. I then looked at the power supply, an 700W OCZ ModXstream Pro. I can't see much due to its covering and I don't want to remove the cover because that voids the warranty, but I didn't see any obvious signs of damage and there was no burning smell.
However, and its a big however, when I pulled the power supply out and turned it sideways, a small piece of an IC component popped out with the main part number of TNY278PN. According to the web pages I found this describes the component:
Here are my questions:
■ This may seem obvious but I like to be careful. Is it safe to say that the PWM controller popped and that the power supply is the fault?
■ How likely is it that the motherboard or other components got damaged? I read on the web that symptoms like mine usually indicate a "primary" side failure and that does not usually damage the rest of the system, but I'd like to get some more opinions.
■ What are the odds that one of the system components caused the failure due to a short and the PSU popping was a secondary failure and not the root cause? This is the big question of course because simply hooking up another power supply will be fruitless.
■ Are there any tests, checks, etc. you would try if you were in my shoes, besides trying a new power supply?
■ I'm going to hit OCZ up for a replacement, but I still wouldn't want to risk harming my main system in the future if this is a common occurrence with that line. Would you stick with OCZ or switch to perhaps Antec or Corsair? I've heard good things about Antec but I've also seen several noise complaints about some of their units too.
Note, this system worked fine for nearly 2 years without incident. Also, much to my dismay, because I thought I researched the PSU pretty thoroughly before I bought it, a Google search for "OCZ loud pop blue flash" turns up a disturbing number of similar reports by other users with the OCZ line. The problem of course is that I didn't think to use those keywords in my initial search. I will next time.
Also, according to my calculations, this PSU was actually overkill for the system which contains a P7P55D motherboard, two standard SATA hard drives, a common low-end ATI graphics card that doesn't require its own power, and about 4GB of RAM. Hardly a power hungry gamer's system or the like by any measure.
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