Power Supply & Sparks

Ok, I'm afraid that I may have destroyed my computer, so let me detail what happened and hopefully someone knows what the cause and result is. I had finished putting together a new computer and had plugged it in for the first time. However, when I flipped the switch on the power supply from off to on, sparks started flying out of the power supply. They stopped after a moment and I quickly pulled the plug. Just to be clear, I didn't turn the computer on. I was turning on the power supply. Anyway, here below are the parts that comprise my computer. Thanks in advance

Power Supply-SeaSonic S12-500 ATX12V 500W

Processor-AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

Graphics Card-eVGA 256-P2-N527-AX Geforce 7800GTX 256MB

Motherboard-ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

Optical Drive-NEC Black IDE/ATAPI DVD Burner Model ND-3550A

Hard Drive-(2)Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150

Case-Thermaltake XASER, Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower

Memory-OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)

Try a different PSU if you are afraid the one that 'sparked' will cause damage.

Have you tried Jump starting it?

{NcsO}ReichstaG said:

Have you tried Jump starting it?

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What do you mean by "jump starting?"

connect green to any black wire i think, but don't cross the streams; jk i made the last part up; green to black though

Plaman said:

connect green to any black wire i think, but don't cross the streams; jk i made the last part up; green to black though

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What he's talking about is takinga a piece of wire and connecting the green wire and a black wire on the PSU's motherboard connector to try the PSU without having anything else hooked up to the PSU. Dot not have any drives or anything hooked to the PSU when you do this as you are just trying to test the PSU.

Personally, I wouldn't bother. If you heard popping and saw sparks coming from the PSU, it's shot. RMA it immediately. As for checking the rest of your hardware, that's a bit tougher if you don't have another PSU you can hook up to the system. You'll just have to find a way to get another PSU to hook up to the system if you want to check the rest of the parts if you don't have another system to check them in one by one.

stop

dismount the mobo with a speaker, the CPU and HSF and a single drive attached and try a different PSU, get a beep

attach the vidcard and monitor try for BIOS

what it very much sounds like is your S-12 taking a bullet because of a short

there is power being drawn by the mobo even when the computer is not "on"
that is how it wakes on LAN, WAN or by keyboard

so dismount that board to ensure there is not a short
and verify your components are OK with a known good PSU

then try the S-12 on something old or the green to black trick mentioned above, but also place a load on it, "jump starting" wont work all the time without some load
generally a drive will do

all rudimentary tests will tell you is that the power supply is putting out some kind of voltage, maybe its in spec, maybe not, to actually tell that you need to hook it to a computer and read the rails via the BIOS, that would be indicative if not precise, for precision youd need a Digital Multimeter and read them directly

while an incorrectly located standoff shorting to the back of the board is the most likely candidate its not the only one, incorrectly attached leads, or blown components (drives fans ect) can be the cause

when you build a new computer take it one step at a time