Power supply fail frying motherboard?

[mjbphotos]

Several years ago it happened to me - the tech said that the PS had been supplying low power which caused the MB to overwork and eventualy conk out (think it was a Dell).

So Saturday morning I come home from a building supply run at Lowes to find my computer off. Curious. Press power button, nothing. F*CK! Crawled under the desk, unplugged the power cord, unsnaked it , pulled the computer out of its spot, tried plugging into a different outlet. Nothing.
Luckily, this time nothing fried in the computer (that's become evident yet). New PS has a massive bottom-facing fan (completely silent), 600W with a huge snake of wires/connectors.
But until I got it installed Sunday morning and rebooted, I was very glad I had triple-backed up all my files in the last 2 weeks!

 

[Pinky]

Low voltage can definitely cause electronics designed to operate at a certain spec (or range of voltages) to flake out. It wouldn't necessarily lead them to failure, but can cause instability of the computer.

Usually failures are from over-voltage situations (spikes). I've had power supplies die, and in the process send a surge through all the connected wires and take out just about everything connected to them internally. MOST of the time though when a power supply fails and a surge occurs, the onboard fuse or another key component takes the brunt off the surge, and this stops the surge from reaching the attached computer components. That's why in most cases you can just swap the power supply and problem's solved.

It sounds like your past experience was a bad motherboard, and most recent just a failed power supply. No correlation.

 

[DM60]

I have to agree with Pinky. I could see low voltage making it unstable, but not frying it. At least it hasn't happened to me in 25+ years and I have had to replace lots of PS'es.

I mean a tech guy is going to see a lot more things than I would, even with all of my years, it is a volume thing. But I don't see how. Maybe the capacitors get affected?

 

[Pinky]

I mean a tech guy is going to see a lot more things than I would, even with all of my years, it is a volume thing. But I don't see how. Maybe the capacitors get affected?

Tech guys that do hardware work for companies like Dell only have to pass an online exam. Sometimes you get lucky and it's an experience tech doing side work, but most of the time they're geek squad rejects with a screwdriver.

 

[rob aylestone]

All technical people have to make the decision to explain accurately, and leave the customer totally confused, or dilute it and make it understandble. A motherboard can't overwork. If a problem occurs, then switch mode supplies usually shut down if the current rises, or the voltage drops. Motherboards don't use more power if they are working hard, or idling. They get hotter, and this often causes, or trigger a fault. Motherboards rarely fry - it's usually a simple component failure - sometimes this component overheats and perhaps even bursts. My mac died on Saturday, and the genius who took it in told me some real rubbish, but knew the real problem, as I did, and not knowing I understood it, used some quite good analogies to explain the drive problem. Some were actually rather good and I'm going to use them myself. Bad sectors on a hard drive, in case you are wondering - and the example of a library with a poem in one of the books, but the list of which shelf it was on, had been lost, so my computer was having to search through book after book to find the right one!

My Mac, kept falling over on battery power, so all the tests I did pointed to the battery - the Applestore's diagnostics tracked it down to one corrupt sector being the one that is involved with the software determining battery/power supply status. Pulling the power triggered the accessing of the bad data and instant shutdown.

 

[Pinky]

My Mac, kept falling over on battery power, so all the tests I did pointed to the battery - the Applestore's diagnostics tracked it down to one corrupt sector being the one that is involved with the software determining battery/power supply status. Pulling the power triggered the accessing of the bad data and instant shutdown.

Holy crap, never heard of that happening before.