If the power supply dies, will the whole system die too?

fanerman91 · Post by **fanerman91** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 11:51 pm

It's a 2 year-old Sparkle 350 watt.

Another question, will a duct allow me to run an 80mm Panaflo L1A at about 7 volts without me worrying about it... dying?

ChucuSCAD · Post by **ChucuSCAD** » Thu Jun 10, 2004 5:38 am

If by die you mean not turn on.... Well yes. However I think what you mean will it hurt other components in your system. It depends on how it dies. Most of the time it is simply like a power outtage to your system and does not cause any damage, except for that excel spread sheet you havn't saved yet is lost forever. In some rare cases when a power supply fails it can cause a spike in voltage, sometimes only cooking one item and sometimes more depending on the severity of its demise.

How do you know it is dying? I have seen powersupplies in 386 machines that are still kicking today.

chucuSCAD

Post by **Rusty075** » Thu Jun 10, 2004 5:55 am

7 volts should be fine. (unless you're running a really highly loaded system)

Just try it, and use the highly accurate Palm-2000 temperature sensing device: Put your hand on the back of the PSU. If it's too hot to hold there, you need more airflow.

An overheated PSU rarely dies, at least at first. Usually it hits its thermal cutoff point and turns itself off first.

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Thu Jun 10, 2004 8:08 am

If your PSU dies because of bad components, blown capacitors and similar mishaps your PSUs existing security measures (read fuses) will probably protect your system from any further failures.

If, however, your PSU dies because of prolonged exposure to very high heat levels, you have a problem. Prolonged exposure to high heat starts melting the copper windings in the PSU, slowly reducing the number of windings that work to step down the voltages before they go into your mobo/HDD/etc. At one point, the coils are no longer able to step down the voltage and pass all 240V through, baking everything in its path: the mobo, CPU, HDD, etc. In this kind of failure fuses just don't work.

A really horrible experience I had was with a UPS system. It was an ancient one, the batteries almost totally dead. Once there was a huge power spike in the current and the PSU was unable to regulate the line voltage. It let all 400V through to all the equipment connected to the UPS lines. The fuses were unable to kick in. Result: 6 PCs cooked, 3 monitors, 5 credit card machines, 2 photocopy machines and one electronic scale cooked crisp. When we examined the dead PSU, we saw perfectly usable fuses, batteries, control PCB but cooked coils on the transformers.

fanerman91 · Post by **fanerman91** » Thu Jun 10, 2004 11:56 am

burcakb, that's what I'm worried about. If the back is only warm (the touch test) and not too hot, is it fine?

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Thu Jun 10, 2004 1:54 pm

From what I understand, if there's any damage slowly happening to the PSU it should be visible on the copper windings if you open up the PSU. Temp of exhaust air wont tell you anything

fanerman91 · Post by **fanerman91** » Tue Jun 15, 2004 12:13 am

What exactly are the copper windings? What should I be looking for?