The Mystery of the Power Supply Killer

[CheTzu]

Ok it started out as a normal day of computing - filesharing, watching movies, listening to music, and then when I played Age of Myth, poof the comuter turned off. And it did not turn back on. No lights, no fan, no sign of any jolt of energy anywhere.

So after a long time of denial, I noticed my 650w "extremo power" dual fan power supply had the smell of IHOP on a busy day. I wondered why after day after day of constant use of downloading videos, burning DVD's, gaming, audio engineering, college papers, web design, etc etc, why burn out now? I couldnt figure out the answer.

So I put in a regular 420w power supply and my computer worked again. I played around with it, to see if anything weird happened. I uninstalled the virus scanner, installed another one, websurfed here and there, and then I played Age of Myth and after about half an hour of play, my computer shut down again! But this time it was different, even though it did not turn back on, there was a light still on. So I unplugged it for about two minutes.

When I plugged it back in, I was able to turn my computer back on. Really confused as to what the *censored* could behind this altered dimension of wacky hardware I chose to run my antivirus program which at that point I thought maybe there is some kind of state of the art virus that is burning my power supplies. After about half an hour to 40 minutes of virus scanning my comuter made this "poof" sound and my computer has not been able to turn back on since.

I already lost a 650w dual fan psu and a 420w psu because of this mystery. I have a 550w psu left but I dont want to install it until I know what is causing this havoc. I do have 250w to test any ideas.

I have a relatively high performance system. 2 IEDE HDD's (with fans), 2 SATA HDD's (with fans), 1 21in and 1 17in monitor, 1gb pc 3200 memory, G-Force 5600 256mb video card, Delta 66 audio card with the Omni Studio external interface, a DVDburner, a DVD/CDR combo, a front panel digital display, side and roof led fans, and a led fan in the back and also two game pads, Pocket PC, and a digital camera all connected to USB ports. This was all working just fine, for close to half a year already.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Computer_Commando]

This happened to me.  Took me months to find the problem.  There is probably one card or device that has shorted out.  A short will turn off the power supply (they are short circuit protected).  When the card or device cools, it may start working again.  In my case, it was a high power audio card with it's own 12VDC connector from the power supply.  One day, it stayed shorted.  I found it by opening the case, looking inside and continually pushing the power button. I saw a flash of light just before the power supply shuts down.  Pulled the audio card and could see a burned surface mount capacitor next to the audio output transistor.

I'll bet if you install the original power supply it will work (for a little while), unless the bad card is finally dead.