KA-POW!!!

[|iR|Focalor]

KA-POW!!!

...said my PC's power supply. It's been making that awful freight train door rattling noise for a year now, which is just the fan brushes/bearings/whatever wearing out or gunked with dust. Usually I could slap the underside of the fan in the psu box to knock the wobble and noise out. But last night it wouldn't stop no matter how many pimp slaps I doled out.

So this morning I took it out, opened it up, and blew the dust out with an air compressor (NOT the aerosol can shit, the shit you blow sawdust off with and pump up car tires with, LOL). But I was not done, oh noooooo. Then I sprayed WD40 into the fans axle area. BECAUSE I'M FUCKIN BRILLIANT, hell yeah. Then I realized I had some electrical contact cleaner. (Too late, oops.) So ... I sprayed some of that in there too, shouldve done that INSTEAD of a flammable oil, but fuck, its too early to use logic, right? So then I get paranoid that the WD40 might drip or splash or mist onto a big high voltage capacitor and kill the PSU. So I'm standing there for 10 mins with my old ladys revlon hair dryer, trying to dry WD40 off my psu like a fuckin idiot.


I get it put back in and fired up... it's not rattling, yay! So I sit there browsing my usual morning bullshit... and very slowly but surely, the noise comes back. And then...


A sound like a 22 pistol blasts me in the ear, a quick burst of fire shoots out back of my PC, it starts pouring a noxious burnt plastic smelling smoke, and starts humming. I yanked the cord out of it.

So uh... yeah, WD40 and electronics arent friends.

[|iR|Focalor]

HA! Dammit man! Glad I made this thread to document the date when I bought my last PSU.

So if I'm not mistaken, when I made this thread, my machine had a Cooler Master brand power supply, probably a 300 watter or less. Sometime after this thread, I replaced it with what I thought was a far superior EVGA brand 400 watt. This thread was made late September 2018, so that means the EVGA 400 watt PSU is only a hair over 3 years old. And mind you, it's BEEN making that awful buzzing sound that a PSU makes when the fan bearings wear out since maybe 6 months after I got it, granted only on rare occasions, and it stopped when I took the side panel of the tower off and smacked the side of the PSU box. But over the last week, it started doing it CONSTANTLY.

So I headed up to MicroCenter (it's a big computer store, dunno if they have them wherever you are, whoever you are) and looked around for something hopefully rather cheap but decent to replace it. I only "THOUGHT" it was about 3 years old until I saw this thread just now. But yeah, getting 3 years lifespan out of a PSU is fuckin' BULLSHIT, man!

But I saw they had an EVGA 500 watt for about 50 bucks. That was honestly a little more than I wanted to pay. Got it home, ripped the old shitty 400 watter out, crammed the new 500 watter in there, got all the wires zip-tied out of the way of fans and shit, and fired it up. The very first thing it did... BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Fans making fuckin' noise! Brand new PSU! I hollered, "ARE YOU SHITTING ME!?!"

I go online looking, hoping to find something saying that a virus might be causing my system to regulate the fan speed in such a way as to induce that shitty worn out fan noise,... because it's a BRAND NEW power supply! I couldn't really find anything like that. I found pages mentioning that sometimes an out of date BIOS can cause fan noise, but what they really mean by that is that the fan would spin too fast and be noisy that way, not that it would make racket like a failing fan.

So obviously I got a lemon PSU. But considering the last EVGA PSU only lasted 3 years before the fan went noisy, I think it's a pretty clear indicator that EVGA is not the high quality brand of PSU that I (and plenty of other people) thought it was.

So long story short... DON'T buy EVGA power supplies. Their quality control obviously SUCKS.

The one I got today... I paid 130 bucks for it (*gnashes teeth). It's a Seasonic 650 watter with those modular cables or whatever you call them. Got it in, fired it up... quiet as a fuckin' mouse. If this thing makes a fuckin' PEEP anytime in the next year, I'm going back up there with a pickaxe and a hockey mask.

Fuck EVGA.

[0rbisson]

Might wanna check the graphics card too. I had a burning smell for a while, random shut downs. I thought it was the PSU but was the graphics card. It smoked my mother board lost everything

[|iR|Focalor]

I don't think my graphics card has a fan on it. It's an older AMD Radeon HD 6450. No fan, just a heat sink. From google, it looks like there were a few different versions of this card, some with a fan, some without. I guess mine had a small enough chip that it didn't require a dedicated fan.



I don't know if any GPU's are made like this anymore, but if you can find one for a newer machine you might be building, I'd recommend it. The fewer fans the better.

[rikwad]

Holy crap! I thought I was the only person here who used an HD 6450. I have the Sapphire Flex version. Nice old card - no fans or extrs power dongle required. I Think the intel 4600 in my other machine is actually more powerful slightly, though. lol* Still I will keep the Sapphire 'til it croaks.

[|iR|Focalor]

I didn't pick it out or anything. This machine was a Lenovo IdeaCentre K330 pre-built package or whatever you call it, purchased from the old TigerDirect distribution center that used to be located near me (closed a few years ago unfortunately). Other than power supplies, it's been a solid machine. Got it as a Christmas present from my old lady sometime in the 2010 to 2012 area, can't really remember. So it's around 10 years old. The original 1.33 TB HDD is still going strong.



It's a nice looking box. The 3-way switch on the front makes the flame change colors (red, green, or blue), and supposedly would set the performance level of the power supply. I never noticed any difference with it and I always kept it on red. However, the power supply had a proprietary plug that connected to that switch, and since the original PSU went bad, the switch has been disconnected and does nothing anymore. So now I keep it lit up green just so it matches my Razer mouse lights.