Is it possible for 12v line to stop working temporarily?

LordFeste · 7 Dec 2021 at 20:47

Strangest thing.

PSU is 10 years old. Seasonic X Gold. It's survived quite a few upgrades of mobos, cpus and gfx cards.

Pressed the case power button. Nothing. Uhho. Pressed the motherboard power on button. Nothing. Mobo LEDs were active, but nothing else.

checked cables were seated properly, tried again. Nothing. Unplugged almost all the things, tired again, nothing. Went to work.

Came back from work. Computer was switched on. No one else in the house. Probably ghosts.

Normally I switch off at the wall. But hadn't bothered to before going to work.

Computer is fine now.

I'm assuming that the PSU is on its way out, but is it possible for something to fail for a few hours, and then spark back to life?

I've ordered a replacement, as the PSU doesn't exactly fit my setup in any case given its older connection set. Just wondered if it's a known issue with old PSUs? Do they slide in to malfunction rather than just pop?

jayjayuk · 29 Dec 2021 at 12:14

The onl;y thing that springs to mind is that the PSU overheated and refused to power back on until the temperature lowered.

Is it full of dust? might just need a blow out

Sasahara · 30 Dec 2021 at 20:38

Checked your case power button is working properly.

I stripped down and tested all the components of a PC once and it turned out to be the damn cases power button was on it's way out. :/

LordFeste · 8 Jan 2022 at 16:02

There's a power button on my motherboard, which wasn't working either. It's not dusty, suspiciously clean actually, I must've put some compressed air through it more recently than I remember. I do clean my PC regularly, dust and pet hair is a thing I have to contend with.

I installed the new PSU (Seasonic with a 12 year guarantee, so should be good for a while yet) and so far since mid-December, it's been flawless. Seems a shame to waste this PSU, so I'm not throwing it out if there's a chance it could still be OK/usable. Once my multimeter has a new 9v battery inside it, I'll see about testing it and finding out what's what.

Cheers.