I leave me computer on all the time but of course sometimes if it hadn't been used it will shutdown. So today the computer was off. So I press the power button and I hear this load pop. I did smell a faint burnt smell but didn't see any smoke. The system restarted on its own and completely booted up. As best as I can tell, everything works which makes no sense to me. So far I can't see any component that looks blown. I'm guessing it's got to be the motherboard or the power supply since the mobo restarted after the pop. Of course there is a concern of a fire hazard. The mobo is an Asus P8B WS and the power supply is a Corsair HX520. Please help, I don't want to get rid of the entire computer considering I just bought a couple of blu-ray drives and a 2 TB SSD drive a few months ago. TIA
![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
-
Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
Help diagnose what happened here!
- Thread starter Bird222
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2010
- Messages
- 8,646
use your sniffer and check around when it is off and see where you smell the strongest, then do visual inspection from there.
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2012
- Messages
- 1,900
Well, something went bad, a pop is usually a capacitor. Typically the 5V tend to go first in a PSU, especially if everything else still works. Try checking the case fans, front panel headers, and SSD's or HDD's.
Fans work, everything seems to work. I don't really smell anything strong. That's why I'm so confused. Is the consensus that it's the power supply? I'm going to open the power supply and look around. Most importantly is there a risk of something catching fire?
Last edited:
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2012
- Messages
- 1,900
There's always a risk of something catching fire, or at least, smoking, eventually. It could be something that briefly failed and overcurrent protection kicked in to save the day, but a capacitor for said overcurrent protection popped. If you can't see anything visually, you'd have to get a multimeter to measure everything, and that would be time consuming. I had a few capacitors fail in motherboards, but they still operated fine. Sometimes it only affected something minor, and replacing it fixed the issue. You'll probably just want to leave the computer on when you're around it, and turn it off when you're not using it.
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2000
- Messages
- 78,874
you let the magic blue smoke out. time to start looking for burn marks...
michalrz
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2012
- Messages
- 4,907
Yes, there's a risk. The HX520 is IIRC a pretty old device, so maybe its time simply might be up.
Yeah, I'd say the pop you heard was a capacitor failing. Your system still works, but your PSU is likely working overtime to compensate.
The capacitor might have failed and become either an open circuit, or a resistor. The latter is really bad.
Your motherboard may no longer be receiving nice, smooth DC current, but a combination of DC and a rippling waveform on top, which is something that components do not like.
So, that pop is just the first step to a full-on meltdown and you shouldn't run it, and definitely NOT run it unsupervised.
That all said, it might be 100% fixable, but keep in mind that sticking your fingers inside a hefty PSU like the HX can zap you really hard. Only one 220uF main input capacitor at ~110V stores a little above a joule of energy. It's actually like a solid slap.
Yeah, the magic is no longer there.