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  • #1

    Fried PSU. Mobo or CPU died too?

    My primary workstation at home had been crashing recently whilst running AOE2. I'd put this down to the after effects of a particullarly stubborn bit of spyware I'd recently removed. Thursday night I plugged in my USB pendrive to copy some MP3s and the PC powered off with a pop. Powered it back up, ran for 20 seconds and died again.
    Turns out my several year old 550w QTec PSU blew a capacitor and two others were leaking. Considering it was cheap when I bought it and had run under a fairly high load (5x 10k SCSI drives) 24/7 for most of its life, I wasnt too bothered.
    I replaced the PSU with a spare (a younger and less used 550w QTec), PC worked and was set back to 24/7 crunching.

    Next morning it had turned itself off overnight.
    Did a quick visual check, in leiu of a full stripdown I swapped out the memory, unplugged the DVD and FDD drives and ran it direct off the mains instead of via UPS.
    Turned itself off overnight again.

    So I stripped the beast down. Checked for any signs of damage, shorting, overheat or swollen caps on the mobo, video card etc. Everything looked okay except for the GPU fan on the (overclocked) 9500pro which wasnt spinning particularly freely.
    Took it off the HSF and saw the telltale black mark on the heatsink and swelling on the underside of the fan where it had been cooking up. Bathed the fan liberally in WD40 and saw a marked improvement in spin, reattached it, set up an extractor fan on the back side of the card and dropped the Core/Mem overclock from 290/290 to 270/270, an underclock of 7mhz on the GPU.
    With high hopes and a cool heatsink on the 9500 (after 6 hours on and a couple of quick games of Call of Duty) it was left overnight : this time justdownloading and not crunching to try and rule out stress on the CPU.

    Dead again this morning.

    I'm starting to worry I've blown the Mobo or CPU when the PSU fried
    I've blown PSUs before and had all components survive, but that was with an Epox mobo and an early Athlon XP.
    I'm running an Asus A8V mobo with a Winchester cored A64/939 and two sticks of matched 512mb Crucial PC3200. Stock heatsink & fan, never had any issues with overheating. Running default voltages at 230fsb (dont think this is an Overclock issue as its been like this for 18 months running Seti or Boinc).

    Next step is to swap the 9500 for an 8500LE and run something like memtest86 overnight to eliminate OS issues and/or graphics card.
    Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.
    Tags: None
  • #2
    I hope you get it it fixed, but to be honest qtec psu's are ones of the worst brands (never used one but I've heared horror stories and the qtec rails are really crap) get a decent psu.
    Main: Dual Xeon LV2.4Ghz@3.1Ghz | 3X21" | NVidia 6800 | 2Gb DDR | SCSI
    Second: Dual PIII 1GHz | 21" Monitor | G200MMS + Quadro 2 Pro | 512MB ECC SDRAM | SCSI
    Third: Apple G4 450Mhz | 21" Monitor | Radeon 8500 | 1,5Gb SDRAM | SCSI

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    • #3
      That sucks, but if your story goes anything like mine, your PC will actually become stable only when you stop messing with it (taking it apart and overclocking it). Look what happens with Formula1 cars - they stopped breaking so easily now that the teams aren't allowed to pull them apart and rebuild them every night.

      Also, just because it worked for 18 months doesn't mean much. If you OC the balls off a system, guess what, it's lifetime is shortened :/

      Maybe try downloading a Mepis or Knoppix linux cd, booting with that, and see if it crashes again. Then you'll know if it's hardware or windows. Good luck either way.

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      • #4
        Update :

        Downloaded the Memtest86 bootable CD last night, swapped the 9500Pro for a Matrox Mystique/RR combo I had (twas the first graphics card I could lay my hands upon as the 8500LE was installed in another box) and ran memtest86 from about 6pm last night to 5:45am this morning.
        No crashes, no errors

        So, swapped back to the 9500Pro and started running memtest86 again. I expect (nay, actively hope) that the PC will have crashed and powered off when I get back home tonight.
        Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by RichL
          Update :

          Downloaded the Memtest86 bootable CD last night, swapped the 9500Pro for a Matrox Mystique/RR combo I had (twas the first graphics card I could lay my hands upon as the 8500LE was installed in another box) and ran memtest86 from about 6pm last night to 5:45am this morning.
          No crashes, no errors

          So, swapped back to the 9500Pro and started running memtest86 again. I expect (nay, actively hope) that the PC will have crashed and powered off when I get back home tonight.
          If so, you must send the dead 9500Pro to me.
          The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

          I'm the least you could do
          If only life were as easy as you
          I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
          If only life were as easy as you
          I would still get screwed

          Comment

          • #6
            Well, colour me confused but after 12 hrs of running Memtest86 with the suspect 9500Pro, my PC was alive and healthy.
            So I rebooted into Windows and...bamf! Power off.
            To further rule out any OS issues, I booted into the barely used WinXp-64-Beta on the same disk. This worked fine, but as soon as it loaded up the radeon drivers and I went to change the display resolution from 640x480@16c colours to something better, it powered off.

            At this point I swore a bit.
            Further investigation and a hunch revealed that the caps had swollen and leaked on the second PSU I'd installed. I hadn't check the insides of the PSU before installation so I've no idea if it was like it before being subjected to the iffy 9500 fan or not.
            I swore a bit more.

            I replaced the HSF on the 9500Pro with an old Vantec Iceberg I found in my spares box and that and the original pair of memory sticks were stuck in another box which was running BOINC/CPDN under Windows XP quite happily from last night through this morning and is probably still going ok now. As that PC is running a DFI Lanparty NF2 mobo and a Duron1600@ over 2ghz from a 350w PSU I'm sure that the 9500 and memory is okay. I feared the Vantec wouldnt be up to the job of cooling the 9500, but it seems to be doing admirably so far. In fact, the 9500 wasnt getting particularly warm with the old heatsink on in the first place.

            The 8500LE and pair of memory sticks that came out of the XP box went into my suspect PC, along with an old 400wPSU.
            It worked fine for several hours running BOINC, Shareaza in the background and me surfing the net. Then it BSODed with an "IRQ not less than" error. I normally get these when I overclock too hard so I turned the FSB down from 230 to 220.
            Half an hour later is BSODed again, different error but BOINC manager had been reporting errors so I wound it back to standard clock. I figure either the PSU isnt supplying enough juice for the overclock or the memory (same Crucial PC3200 as the others, but single not double sided) arent as overclockable.
            By now it was getting late so I turned off BOINC and left the PC running Shareaza overnight.

            This morning, it was running fine and still downloading stuff. The XP box with the 9500 in is also healthy. I guess either the second QTec PSU was dodgy before testing of blew up as a result of the 9500 still having a bad fan. Or I've placed my PCs over the site of an ancient Indian burial ground...
            I'm off to buy some replacement capacitors for the dodgy PSU and once that's fixed I'll try the system with the old memory sticks and the 9500 again.

            If it doesnt work, I shall cry.
            Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.

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            • #7
              I don't wanna sound negative but ditch that qtec (they are cheap but also really crappy) and get a decent PSU certainly when your overclocking (even if it's a minimal overclock).
              Main: Dual Xeon LV2.4Ghz@3.1Ghz | 3X21" | NVidia 6800 | 2Gb DDR | SCSI
              Second: Dual PIII 1GHz | 21" Monitor | G200MMS + Quadro 2 Pro | 512MB ECC SDRAM | SCSI
              Third: Apple G4 450Mhz | 21" Monitor | Radeon 8500 | 1,5Gb SDRAM | SCSI

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              • #8
                Originally posted by KeiFront
                I don't wanna sound negative but ditch that qtec (they are cheap but also really crappy) and get a decent PSU certainly when your overclocking (even if it's a minimal overclock).
                Everyone says that about QTecs, but mine have done me sterling service for no money until now, that includes an overclocked XP2000 with 5x10,000rpm SCSI disks and a full set of fans running.

                I've got a replacement 550w PSU on order (now two of), but I dont want to plug in a brand new PSU if I'm wrong and havent fixed the cause of the crashes/PSU burnouts.
                Repairing the QTec will cost me £1.50 in parts and ten minutes with a soldering iron. If it works, then I'll replace it with a better PSU.
                If I'm wrong, I burn out the PSU at a cost of £1.50 and ten minutes time.
                Athlon XP-64/3200, 1gb PC3200, 512mb Radeon X1950Pro AGP, Dell 2005fwp, Logitech G5, IBM model M.

                Comment

                • #9
                  Originally posted by RichL
                  Everyone says that about QTecs, but mine have done me sterling service for no money until now, that includes an overclocked XP2000 with 5x10,000rpm SCSI disks and a full set of fans running.

                  I've got a replacement 550w PSU on order (now two of), but I dont want to plug in a brand new PSU if I'm wrong and havent fixed the cause of the crashes/PSU burnouts.
                  Repairing the QTec will cost me £1.50 in parts and ten minutes with a soldering iron. If it works, then I'll replace it with a better PSU.
                  If I'm wrong, I burn out the PSU at a cost of £1.50 and ten minutes time.
                  Yeah, all kinds of no-name PSU's perform great... until you look at them cross-eyed and they expire for no good reason.
                  The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

                  I'm the least you could do
                  If only life were as easy as you
                  I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
                  If only life were as easy as you
                  I would still get screwed

                  Comment

                  • #10
                    Originally posted by RichL
                    Everyone says that about QTecs, but mine have done me sterling service for no money until now, that includes an overclocked XP2000 with 5x10,000rpm SCSI disks and a full set of fans running.

                    I've got a replacement 550w PSU on order (now two of), but I dont want to plug in a brand new PSU if I'm wrong and havent fixed the cause of the crashes/PSU burnouts.
                    Repairing the QTec will cost me £1.50 in parts and ten minutes with a soldering iron. If it works, then I'll replace it with a better PSU.
                    If I'm wrong, I burn out the PSU at a cost of £1.50 and ten minutes time.
                    and risk destroying lots of components hooked up to that PSU in the process

                    Comment

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