Post Your PSU Blowing-Up Stories Here!!!

Hey, the purpose of this thread is two-fold: to help noobs see why buying a low-quality psu is bad, and to have some fun

I have too many to post all of them, so I'll only post some of my favorites:

Culprit #1 Deer 200w psu. system was 600mhz p3, 80GB HD, 256mb ram, nvidia tnt2. I go to turn on the machine, and I notice that for the last few days it had only been starting intermittentley. So this time, I turn it on, hear a series of 5 or 6 BANGS like a capgun going off, smell this horrible smell, and see a bright flash of light. I kill the power button, open up the machine, and the psu is smoking with like fluffy stuff floating around inside the pc case. I figured out later that those were the remains of the caps and the noise I heard was the caps blowing out. It killed the cdrom and the HD. It was a fireworks show, and cheaper to buy than real ones too! I know what I'll be using next 4th of July, imagine the marketing:

Deer PSU Roman Candles! Explodes Every Time, Any Time!!! Even comes with a convienient On/Off switch!!!!!

Culprit #2, power-up 350w psu same system. Basically the same as above, except instead of blown caps, something must have shorted, for the insulation around the wires was burning off! literally melting off. It reeked. This one didnt take anything with it.

Culprit #3. Raidmax 450w supply with 25a claimed on 12v rail. YA right. same system lol. This time, I jus heard a bang, no smell, no light, just a single bang and it killed the mobo and ram.


Let's hear some more!

That computer is CURSED!
I dont have any good psu blowing up stories... things just die, nothing spetacular.

I've got one that's at least slightly better than sudden death. OEM PSU that came with a white box 486 PC. This thing was a good 8 years old, since I got it in 1993 and I know it happened after I built my dual P3 1.0 in 2001. I'd already replaced the PSU fan once, but it failed again and I didn't notice it. One day I put my hand on the case and noticed it was hot- really hot. The machine was still running, but man that case was hot. I shut it off, and went to radio shack to pick up another 80mm fan. I swapped in the new fan, but the box never worked after that. Rather than buying a PSU for an 8yo 486, I just yanked the drives out and stuck them in a spare P200 I had lying around and made that my firewall box as I'd been planning to do for a while but hand't gotten around to.
Then there's the one that went out in our first family computer. It was a Gateway 2000 386sx-16 in a small (at the time) desktop case. Of course it used a baby-AT psu. Gateway sent a Full AT PSU as a replacement. It was running for about a week with a PSU half the size of the case propped up on a block of wood next to the comp for about a week while we awaited a properly sized replacement.
My generic PSU story is much less exciting. I used a cheap case for the first PC I built (that P200). The cheap PSU lasted about 4 years, but it just didn't power up one day. No noise, no smoke, no fire, no flying happy capacitor bits, just the clicking of the power switch.

Ah Deer power supplies, I love them.

Case 1: Deer 250Watt in a Pentium III 733Mhz system. One hard drive, DVDROM, CDRW, floppy and zip. This thing was "decked out" (mind you this was back in 2001) and even had 256MB of RAM with Windows 98SE. Customer brings his computer in complaining that it won't turn on.
My co-worker plugs the system in, hits the power switch and puts his head (WARNING!! WARNING!!!) inside the case. Within 2 seconds, the fireworks began. Flames from the burning resistors shot out of the back of the system as 5+ caps popped and electricity began arching inside the PSU. When World War III subsided, my coworker pulled his head out of the system calmly and told the CU that we would need to check the sytem in to check it over. For future refference, the floppy was still good! Then again nothing else survived.

Case 2: PowMAX 500W Was installed in a SERVER. This *bunny ear finger gesture* server was an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512MB of DDR333 and an IDE RAID cage with a Promise Super Track that was going to be used for email and file storage. Everything was built and running fine but we left it on the bench to run for a couple of days. Good thing too, two days before it was to be delivered, another gut-wrenching pop came from the new build area where we heard three hard drives give the THUNK from Hell as they head crashed. The funny part was when the fan failure alarm in the RAID cage screamed constantly until the power supply failed completely leaving a nice long slowly dieing cry for help.

Case 3: Jetta Pentium III notebook with a "Radshack special" power supply. Customer claimed it was working fine but the light on the orgional power brick wouldn't come on so they bought a new one. Check it in, plug it up and turn it on. The thing does fire up, then slowly starts to smoke. The display just went dim after a few seconds and the fan mysteriously stopped spinning. Opening it up we found the damage, the power regulator circuit was so hot that the soldier melted causing the compents to "travel". The molten solder deposited itself on various other circuitry resulting in massive internal shorts. The Radshack power supply ended up being the culprit, the customer had it set wrong so it was putting out 24V at 10 Amps instead of 12V at 6 Amps. Did I mention they had the polarity wrong as well? To this day I still can't explain how the damn thing managed to turn on in the first place.

Case 4: Deer 300 Watt (notice a pattern here? I hate my ex-employer) Dual Pentium III 1Ghz system with a gig of RAM. Not bad you say? Try it with 5 Ultra 160 Seagate 80GB drives. This thing was a rip station for a Lexmark industrial printer. Why in the name of god you need a server with those specs as a PRINT QUEUE I will never know but anyways... Worked fine until one day a peculiar smell came from inside the case. Yeah ATX wires are not supposed to meld together due to current draw.... Fortunatly, only the PSU died on this one. Now only 29 more to go.... (Yes, they bought 30 of them)

And the final one, not reallly so much power supply crappiness as power supply WTF ARE YOU DOING TO ME?!??!?! STOP IT!!
Case 5: Customer decides his kid can build a computer better than a bunch of techs who have 5+ years of experiance and various certifications can. Kid builds it, fires it up, and it doesn't work, turns off immediatly without the drives or fans spinning up. He brings it in screaming that we sold him defective parts and he wants to speak to the manager.
I get the bastard, lucky me, and calm him down and offer to look at the machine at the counter and see if I can determin what went wrong. I also ask him to bring in any cords/cables he has thinking there might be a short or a bad cable or whatnot. He brings in the normal cables and an AC adaptor with a male mini-jack end.
I crack the side of the case open and it stinks. Something's burned.
I do the normal visual check. Strike 1: Floppy power cable is not plugged in right, it's off by one pin so that the +12V is now on the ground pin of the drive. Show this to him, he dismisses it as a trivial mistake. I seat the plug properly, it turns on, he looks amazed. I continue to check the rest of the system and notice something odd about the Creative Soudblaster Live!. Those of you who remember this card, it has a yellow plug that's slightly smaller than the others at the very top. When I pull the sound card out, the top port was melted to the PCB. I asked him how that happened, he said his son plugged the power adaptor in like you're supposed to and that's what happened so it's our fault.
Long story short, son fried the Creative, but thankfully the Antec had shut itself off from the short on the floppy connector. This kept it and everything else safe from shorting out. Too bad it couldn't protect the Live card from the son's stupidity.

Sorry, Ive never blown anything up with a PSU
not sure but that might be a qualification for the job

Think I fried a mobo with an unsheilded (EMF) AC
3 inch squirrel cage blower though, does that count?
(back when I was a [H]ard Gawd)

Ice Czar said:

Sorry, Ive never blown anything up with a PSU
not sure but that might be a qualification for the job

Think I fried a mobo with an unsheilded (EMF) AC
3 inch squirrel cage blower though, does that count?
(back when I was a [H]ard Gawd)

Click to expand...

What kind of fan puts out so much EMI that it can fry a mainboard?


<--- hasn't blown up any PSUs either. Yet

Oh, here's a good one I forgot. It's not something I did (though I wish I'd seen it).
A guy I used to work with used to repair computers for a living. One day he's replacing a PSU in a machine in a factory. This was back in the AT days so you had to wire in the PSU. Needless to say he gets a couple of the wires mixed up and winds up with a short in the 110V AC wiring. Plugs it in and the next thing he knows the power cable is burning and melting. Crackling and burning plastic is tossing out little droplets of molten copper. The factory had a really heavy duty electrical system, so a "little" short like this wasn't enough to trip any breakers.

Bought an Antec 1080 case a while back that came with an Antec 430W Smart Power supply.

Box it arrived it was fine with no shipping damage. When I took the case out of the shipping box everything looked great as well and I proceeded to get everthing ready to migrate over. I noticed that the power supply bracket that attaches the case to PS was bent and the screws holding it on were loose. I bent it back so it would sit flush with the case, tightened to onto the PS and didn't think too much of it.

Well, perhaps I should have... When I hooked all my stuff up and went to power it on nothing happened for a couple seconds and my mind started the "what could I have missed that would keep it from powering on". Well, I never got to finish that thought as an arc of continuous power erupted inside the supply just as I stuck my head over to look at the open case. It lasted a good 4-5 seconds before I was able to pull the plug from the wall. It was as bright as someone welding and loudly crackling. Smoke proceeded to billow out of the power supply after I got it shut off. Thankfully it didn't set off my smoke alarm in the house or catch anything on fire.

I can only guess that someone dropped or hit the case before it was originally put in the Antec box for shipping from the manufacturer as there was no damage to the box, packaging, or shipping foam.

Antec replaced it without incident...

Moral of the story... if you buy a power supply and it looks possibly damaged, don't take a chance with it. Replace it before you plug it in!

Luckily, none of my components were damaged and nothing exploded inside the power supply.

1st: Had a cheapo psu in a computer that I was fixing for a customer. His pc kept locking up all the time. So I took it in, and soon as I plugged it up (didnt even turn it on yet) I hear something like grease in a skillet. And then POP POP POP POW, and I saw a big flash. I jerked the cord out of the psu and smoke started to roll out. I told him what happened later and he paid for a new one no prob.
2nd: I had a 500w Raidmax PSU in my pc. One morning I woke from a dead sleep to a sound like a gunshot and then shattering glass. No smoke (that I saw). Just a bad stench. I replaced it with an Antec True 550.

my brother-in-law just fried a preconfigured gaming rig where they foisted off a RAIDmax on him
lasted less than a week, and was dead as a doornail by the time I got to see it
would not POST

serves him right for not having me build it for him

Got a new lab computer at work, a whitebox from a local computer store. "PRO-POWER" brand power supply. The computer store built it but didn't test it. We planned to set up all the software ourselves.

So we turned it on... it posted OK, and I was setting up the BIOS to boot from CD when suddenly, "psssssSSSSSSSSSS... BANG!" Sparks, aluminum foil and brown paper blew out the back of the power supply, and an awful burnt vinegar smell filled the room. The circuit breaker the supply was plugged into tripped.

The computer store sent a guy over with a new power supply (a HEC)... thankfully nothing else in the computer was killed. As he set the computer up, I took apart the dead supply and inside I found two things:

- one of the main 200V capacitors had completely exploded, throwing aluminum and paper onto everything, including the main AC inlet. Input rectifier had turned to carbon.
- silkscreened in black on the top of the PCB? "DEER"

seems Deer has a new name, watch out for it...

gee said:

[..] I took apart the dead supply and inside I found two things:

- one of the main 200V capacitors had completely exploded, throwing aluminum and paper onto everything, including the main AC inlet. Input rectifier had turned to carbon.
- silkscreened in black on the top of the PCB? "DEER"

seems Deer has a new name, watch out for it...

Click to expand...

That's not a PSU, it's a friggin' bomb

Whatever would cause this to happen? I mean, it's not that easy to blow up one of the big caps inside a PSU...

Elledan said:

That's not a PSU, it's a friggin' bomb

Whatever would cause this to happen? I mean, it's not that easy to blow up one of the big caps inside a PSU...

Click to expand...

Years ago I used to take caps out of dead power supplies, charge them up to 200V, and shoot them with a pellet gun. They'd explode - there's quite a bit of energy in a fully charged cap. the 6800uF/450V cap I have sitting on my desk here technically holds enough charge to launch itself >1km into the air

As for how it failed, I don't know the exact method of failure... If you exceed the voltage rating on an electrolytic, it usually punches through its dielectric and shorts itself, then promptly blows itself open. It could have been a bad cap. Or if the rectifier behind the cap had a diode fail short, it could have put negative volts into the cap and blew it with line current...

gee said:

As for how it failed, I don't know the exact method of failure... If you exceed the voltage rating on an electrolytic, it usually punches through its dielectric and shorts itself, then promptly blows itself open. It could have been a bad cap. Or if the rectifier behind the cap had a diode fail short, it could have put negative volts into the cap and blew it with line current...

Click to expand...

Normally bad caps don't explode, do they? I'm blaming a bad design in this case. After all, it's a Deer

Re caps and pellet guns: beware of the bored engineer =)

System I built a while back had an antec true 330 in it...first power on produced a loud pop, a huge flash of white light out the back and smoked up the whole room....I got a fire extinguisher cause I thought it was on fire but nope...just ate shit

Didn't hurt anything else though