Power Supply Burned out

Gweeps

Gweeps

Gweeps

Associate
Joined
19 Oct 2014
Posts
50
Hey

Earlier today I was playing a game and suddenly the monitor went black and my PC shut off almost immediately. As I looked towards my PC I felt a smell as if something was being burned and quickly switches off the power supply on the back (as well as taking the power cable out), then opened the case up and there was a minor amount of smoke rising too. I have not attempted to start it since.

As far as I can tell the smoke was coming from the power supply. What I'm wondering is what to do now. After googling a bit I've seen some people claim all parts will be broken in the PC, while others say to just swap the power supply.

Is it reasonable to buy a new PSU and install it, then try to boot the PC up then, and if that still fails accept that more of the PC is broken? What is a good way to go about this?

Thanks
 
If PSU's secondary fails there's always risk of damage to PC.
Especially with cheaper PSUs. Worst ones don't have proper protections monitoring output voltages.
If it's primary (mains voltage side) which gives up the magic smoke in good PSUs there's very little risk for PC.
Because protections push that "mushroom button"/emergency stop if voltages stray too far from nominal.

Of course that smoke could have been also caused by something else shorting and burning.
(again good PSU's protections shut it down when current rises too high)

So try to look/smell from where that magic smoke escaped.
Burned electronics should smell/stink for good time afterwards.

And what kind parts you have there?
Because also my crystal ball gave up the ghost...
 
As far as I can tell from looking/smelling it is the PSU but I'm not too sure, nothing is visibly damaged as far as I can tell. Have a bit of a runny nose so smelling the specific area is difficult. As mentioned though, I'm fairly certain I saw smoke rising out of the power supply as it shut off.

Specs are:
SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 850W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 G1 Gaming 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK
Devil's Canyon Core i7 4790K
Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD
Avexir Golden Blitz 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C10 2400MHz
Corsair Hydro H110 280mm High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
NZXT KRAKEN X61 280mm AIO Water Cooling Unit
In a NZXT Phantom 530 Full Tower
 
From what you've said it sounds reasonable that the PSU is dead, is it under warranty?

I'm not familiar with superflower but people on here seem to rate them, so I'd guess the power supply committed suicide before damaging any other components but that's just a guess as it's what I'd expect from a decent quality power supply.
 
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