Lost a Corsair power supply yesterday....

There are two main tests of a power supply:

1) Does it fail?
2) If it fails, does it blow up anything else in your computer?

Well, my Corsair 650 failed the first test. It failed badly enough to knock my APC 1400 UPS offline briefly, and let out a fair bit of magic smoke. (all electronics run on magic smoke; you can tell, because if you let the smoke escape, the parts stop working.) The whole room still smells badly of fried electronics.

So far, though, it seems to have passed the second test. I replaced it with a Corsair 850 that was on sale at Best Buy, and not only does everything seem to be working, it also seems to be running faster. I think maybe the old one had been failing for awhile; I was getting some odd symptoms on the machine sometimes, like stuttering in TF2 and odd USB problems. I thought it might be Win7, and the problems weren't constant enough to be really annoying, so I'd been ignoring them. But after putting the 850 in, things seem to have sped up a fair bit, so perhaps the 650 was dying for some time and I didn't realize it.

So, while it did fail, it seems to have contained the damage, at least so far. It's not that uncommon to lose other electronic parts later on; the zorch from a dying supply can weaken the electronics, causing them to die weeks or even months after taking the initial damage. But there's no visible problems so far, and I'm quite grateful.

I'll follow up if anything else dies later on.

Malor wrote:

So far, though, it seems to have passed the second test. I replaced it with a Corsair 850 that was on sale at Best Buy, and not only does everything seem to be working, it also seems to be running faster. I think maybe the old one had been failing for awhile; I was getting some odd symptoms on the machine sometimes, like stuttering in TF2 and odd USB problems. I thought it might be Win7, and the problems weren't constant enough to be really annoying, so I'd been ignoring them. But after putting the 850 in, things seem to have sped up a fair bit, so perhaps the 650 was dying for some time and I didn't realize it.

That does seem consistent with advice I've heard before that a dodgy (usually low budget) PSU can cause all sorts of trouble, which usually leads you on a wild goose chase trying to diagnose the faulty component and because it turns on you assume it's not the PSU.

Yeah, I'm thinking now that the 650 was dodgy for sure, because my system used to fail the Intel Burn Test program if I ran it at higher than 'standard' settings. I assumed the program was wrong, but I think that was a bad assumption; it's now passing at Very High. I haven't had time to run it at Maximum yet.

As far as I can tell, the 650 should have been adequate for my needs; I have an i7 with 12 gigs and a GTX 295. The 295 needs about 300 watts max, and the TDP on the i7 is about 150 watts, so I should have been in the clear by at least a hundred watts, after memory and drives. But the new 850 is definitely working better, so it's pretty clear that the 650 was underpowered, no matter what the paper specs claimed.

My Corsair failed and took out everything.. I think its a matter of random luck. I've probably had just about every manufacture power supply fail at some point... its kinda a given that eventually any powersupply will fail.

Well, that's not a good sign, if we've both had failures. The plural of anecdote is not data, but still.

I know PC Power and Cooling supplies are designed to fail as gracefully as possible.

Hm now this thread has me worried. I picked up a Corsair 650W for a new rig recently and had some flakiness initially that I managed to trace to a bad stick of RAM.

Will try out the Burn Test program to see if how high I can push it.

The Intel Burn Test works fine even at Maximum settings, so my original power supply was not up to snuff.

Now I don't feel quite as bad for going with an OCZ... which failed after 5 months. Technically it didn't fail yet, just started smoking. I RMA'ed it before total failure occurred. I just wish it didn't take a week to ship out and a week to ship back.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Now I don't feel quite as bad for going with an OCZ... which failed after 5 months. Technically it didn't fail yet, just started smoking. I RMA'ed it before total failure occurred. I just wish it didn't take a week to ship out and a week to ship back. :|

My OCZ is rocking after 3 years. Thank you PCP&C designs.

Malor wrote:

I know PC Power and Cooling supplies are designed to fail as gracefully as possible.

This is the biggest reason I buy them. My (erroneously named) Silencer 750 is years old (bought in 2006) and is now powering I believe the 4th iteration of my gaming rig since I got that PSU. It's handled two or three multiple videocard setups, an ever increasing number of hard drives (five now), it almost never gets turned off, my house doesn't have air conditioning so it gets pretty ungodly hot in the summer... just general overall heavy use.

Unless I hear about their direction changing pretty drastically I will continue to buy my power supplies from them.

(erroneously named) Silencer

That's the only reason I stopped buying PCPAC... I can't stand how loud their supplies are. If they made a genuinely quiet supply, I'd have bought quite a lot more of them.

I started getting game crashes yesterday... after some troubleshooting time, it looks like I've lost my (expensive!) Xonar D2X soundcard.

That sucks, Malor. My OCZ replacement arrived and aside from some terror at strange noises (apparently the board won't boot if the video card power cable isn't connected, it just shrieks horribly) my computer is back up and running. Next time I get a PSU failure and have to RMA it though, I'm going to buy a backup. Over 2 weeks is just too long to downgrade to my 2nd machine.

Malor wrote:

I started getting game crashes yesterday... after some troubleshooting time, it looks like I've lost my (expensive!) Xonar D2X soundcard.

Yikes. that stinks. Those are rather expensive.

so I should have been in the clear by at least a hundred watts, after memory and drives. But the new 850 is definitely working better, so it's pretty clear that the 650 was underpowered, no matter what the paper specs claimed.

Was it possible you were drawing too much power off of an aged power supply? You may have had ~100w of headroom originally, but with aged capacitors and whatnot you may have pushed the psu to its limit.

And 16bg of ram? Wow.

Malor wrote:

I started getting game crashes yesterday... after some troubleshooting time, it looks like I've lost my (expensive!) Xonar D2X soundcard.

This doesn't really apply if yours is making glitches, but appears dead: make really *really* sure that the power is attached. I thought mine died after a rebuild, but it turned out the power connection wasn't making contact. For a while I took the individual connectors out of the plastic block, insulated them and put them on the card's pins to make sure. Careful playing around with pliers and it was back to normal operation.

Was it possible you were drawing too much power off of an aged power supply?

Well, it wasn't that old, I bought it in, um, September maybe? Brought it in new with the i7 build.

make really *really* sure that the power is attached.

Yeah, it's working, but games crash badly with looped sounds. Even Heroes of Might and Magic 3 started crashing. As soon as I switched back to motherboard sound, it straightened right up. So apparently something's been torched.

Malor wrote:
Was it possible you were drawing too much power off of an aged power supply?

Well, it wasn't that old, I bought it in, um, September maybe? Brought it in new with the i7 build.

Holy crap. Clearly it wasn't old then. Under warranty, right? Did you start that whole process yet? If so, I'm curious on how well it's worked out.

No, I just bought a replacement 850 that was on sale at Best Buy... it was actually a little cheaper than Newegg, and I got it immediately without paying for FedEx. I didn't want to wait for the RMA.

You must be made of money. I would've done the same, but still done the rma and then sold that one off, even if in the end you're taking a bit of a loss, but it's less of a loss than the $80 you spent on it.

I may have a similar situation. Corsair TX 650 PSU and random flakey hardware issues.

Read about it here: http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/4...

I'm going to pick up a multi-meter on the way home to troubleshoot the unit.

this is all pretty foreign to me, I have had numerous, power supplies of varying quality and have not had any fail on me. Your all talking about the cosairs failing, I was originally under the impression that those were pretty good, is that false?

IMO corsair has a good reputation for hardware. Mine from sept '07 is still going strong, but I'd be curious to hear the dates on the ones that are currently giving problems to people if it's a bad batch. You could also do a google search to see if it's widespread with multiple people reporting them dying.

I have 2 other Corsair power supplies that are going strong for 2 or so years...

As promised, a followup: it looks like I've lost my GTX 295 as well. It's gone unstable, and I thought it was TF2 at first, but I eventually bluescreened when resizing a window on a desktop. At this point, I'd say that Corsair has completely failed the 'don't smoke the computer if the power supply blows up' test.

The upside is that I had an excuse to get a 5870. I got the Sapphire VaporX card, because apparently it has a quieter cooling system, and I'd call it, on the whole, thoroughly better. It's just about as fast in all the testing I've done (in some online benchmarks it falls a little behind the 295), but it's both quieter itself and generates less internal heat, so the rest of my fans are much quieter too.

At this point, my computer's at just about the same overall noise level as it was with the Core 2 Duo and the 8800GT, so I'm pretty pleased with the 5870. It was noticeably louder when carrying the 295.

Running the 10.2 drivers, and while I certainly haven't done any exhaustive testing, it's been perfect so far.

I haven't calibrated the new setup yet, but in initial testing, the screen quality is essentially identical. When I was comparing the 8800 versus the 1900XT, the ATI card was noticeably better at driving my Dell 2405, offering much better colors and improved clarity, even on the desktop. In this generation, driving an HP LP3065, the differences are minimal at best.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

That sucks, Malor. My OCZ replacement arrived and aside from some terror at strange noises (apparently the board won't boot if the video card power cable isn't connected, it just shrieks horribly) my computer is back up and running. Next time I get a PSU failure and have to RMA it though, I'm going to buy a backup. Over 2 weeks is just too long to downgrade to my 2nd machine.

Well, as I was playing Alien Swarm I noticed a distinct acrid smell that it took a while to recognize — the same smell as when my original OCZ power supply died. No visible smoke this time when I opened the case, but I have a feeling that my replacement OCZ will soon be giving up the ghost.

How do you check to see if a PSU is in the process of failing?

If it's dying, it'll be the last OCZ PSU I buy.

If I were you, I wouldn't wait to find out if it fails or not.

Yeah, gonna try to pick one up today and if I can get the OCZ replaced I'll keep that as a spare. The last time it took 2 weeks to replace.

Edit: Picked up a Thermaltake 600W at the local shop.

So we had a storm last night and the power went out for about 5 seconds, while the PC was running. When the power came back up the PC refused to power on. No fans, no system beeps, no noth'n and it's the only item on the circuit or power strip that hasn't come back back (including the display, speakers, and a projector). So, pretty sure my SilverStone PSU has given up the ghost. Going to pick up a new unit at lunch today, but since I'm obsessing... what do you guys think the odds are that I only lost my PSU and not the rest of the system? Wouldn't be surprised if the motherboard or memory were toast too, but my fingers are crossed. Surely the odds of me having lost my hard drives are very low, though, right?

Figures this would happen while I was on my second mission in Starcraft 2.

Sorry to hear about that, ubrakto. You might be OK, but I'd say the odds are 50/50.

I bit the bullet awhile back and bought big UPS's for my desktop, HTPC, and WHS boxes for safety and sanity. I picked up some Cyberpower 1285AVs when Staples had them on clearance for under $100 a piece. Great purchase.

Well, if the machine won't power on, it could also be a motherboard issue. It's the motherboard that detects the power switch on the front of the case and tells the PSU to power on. So there's really two possible points of failure there.

Yeah, I'm worried about that too. But if my mobo is toast then I'll probably just opt for a new system build. I built this one about four years ago; it was still chugging along pretty darn well, but if I'm going to have to spend the money then I may as well do it right.

Anyway, I picked up a 600W Antec (EarthWatts) at lunch today and will give that a go tonight. Fingers are crossed.