Another PC bites the dust!

[Harrison]

Some of you will remember that about 3 years ago (December 2005) my main PC at the time died in a major way, with the PSU going bang and taking the motherboard with it.

Well... you won't believe this! It has happened again!

Today I switched my main PC on to do some design work. It had been running for about 30 minutes and I was just checking through my emails, when suddenly it shut down. No warning. Just turned off.

I tried to power it back on but no response. I disconnected it from the mains, waited a bit and connected it up again. But as soon as I plugged the power in and switched the switch on on the PSU itself the fans all span for a couple of seconds and then went off. That hasn't been a good sign in the past when I've been repairing other's PCs. And it wouldn't power up at all.

So I unplugged it and took the side off, and a nice burnt electrical smell was coming from the PSU, so that was obviously dead! Luckily I had another spare PSU not being used, so I took the dead one out and connected up the new one. Powered it on and the same thing happened. Fans all spun for 2 seconds then the system was dead.

So next I stripped it right down to the Motherboard, CPU, I ram DIMM and the graphics card. Tried to power it but the same happened. Some further tests later and I've now reached the conclusion that the PSU has killed either the graphics card or the motherboard. A friend is posting me an old PCI graphics card so I can test to see if it is the existing PCI-E card that is dead. But I have a feeling it is my nice Asus A8N-SLI Premium board that is dead.

So looks like it is again time to build a new PC using what is left of this now dead system. How annoying.

Has anyone else had a PC die recently? And what happened?

[Bloodwych]

Wow, that's really unlucky that the PSU has killed other components.

What kind of PSU was it? A brand named one? Or a generic one that came with a case? Knowing you Harrison, I'd imagine it was a quality PSU. I think there have been some dodgy PSU's out there over the years, brand names included, that didn't account for the huge increase in power graphics cards demanded.

I've seen friends generic PSU's give up like that when they've been overstressed and it took out his graphics card.

I've never once had a computer or console fail on me. That's why I haven't bought an Xbox 360 - I don't want to ruin my perfect record!

For PC's, I've always bought quality PSU's and checked they have ample power or the various rails. I think today it's even more important, with graphics cards and CPU's pulling many amps.

You were going to build a new computer anyway weren't you? I have a Q6600 for my media/work PC and it's a dream to run at 3Ghz. I think the newer quad cores are 45nm, more energy efficient, faster clock for clock and run cooler - I'd look at getting one of those.

[taunusanden]

I have always bought cheap or used pc's, if I ever had a problem, it has been windoze related. But I might just be luckey :-)

I have replaced a few psu's for my friends though..

[Stephen Coates]

I've never had such problems.

But I did recently fry my parallel port by connecting a circuit to it, then connecting said circuit to a 24V power supply by accident. (Both are only supposed to take 5V).

All is fine now though, except the parallel port. The computer did crash, but was fine after being reset.

[thirtywinter]

There was this one guy that came to me with a motherboard for a xbox 360 that was so badly warped that when we powered it up sparks would fly across the board. Very useless, but oddly entertaining.

[Chewieshmoo]

I have always bought cheap or used pc's, if I ever had a problem, it has been windoze related. But I might just be luckey :-)

I have replaced a few psu's for my friends though..

You been lucky, cheap PSU is just trouble waiting to happen.........

[Buleste]

The only thing major that's happened to me is after 10 years the main c drive (9GB)on my PC atarted showing various hard errors. So I got a cheap 37 GB drive (I have a 250GB 2nd drive) and used Acronis to copy my contents and now everything is mostly O.K.

[v85rawdeal]

And my monitor just died.... Bloody annoying that is, but nowhere near as bad as your situation, Harrison.