• 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.

How do PSUs degrade over time?

V

venm11

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 6, 2004
Messages
2,236
Most electronic devices degrade over time for various reasons.

An example of this is lamps used in displays- the lifetime of these is rated by the time it takes for the lamp's brightness to decline to 50% (a logarithmic decline).

So what I'm wondering is, how does a PSU change over time? What can we expect from a PSU over ~3 years, in terms of wattage/current capacity, noise/ripple, or other characteristics?

I'm guessing that very few of folks' systems on this forum exceed 50% of their PSU's capacity (stated or measured). Nonetheless, PSUs do blow out, often when they are old and the electical load changes or spikes (during startup, or maybe a hardware change?). I wonder if, in addition to buying headroom for future expansion and lowering stress on the system, we're paying also for the general amount of time for it to decay to where it can't reliably function?
 
temeprature, quality of current from the mains, quality of parts... theyre usually rated at 80,000 hours at x amount of load % so that's the first thing you should look at.
 
hardc0re said:
temeprature, quality of current from the mains, quality of parts... theyre usually rated at 80,000 hours at x amount of load % so that's the first thing you should look at.
Click to expand...

So.... is 80,000 hours the average amount of time to catastrophic failure?

Will the wattage/current capacity decline over this time, logarithmically?
 
Most PSU's die slowly... like you won't be able to boot occasionally... then you won't be able to boot at all...

I doubt it'll kill anything though... just die :p
 
Blazestorm said:
Most PSU's die slowly... like you won't be able to boot occasionally... then you won't be able to boot at all...

I doubt it'll kill anything though... just die :p
Click to expand...
Well, if a power supply is not supplying enough power, then stuff does not run right and you very well will probably kill stuff.
 
I've never seen a computer be "damaged" if a powersupply dies... it just stops working. Usually over-time things will start to degrade and slowly work less..

I just don't see how less power going to parts is going to make them fail...
 
Blazestorm said:
I've never seen a computer be "damaged" if a powersupply dies... it just stops working. Usually over-time things will start to degrade and slowly work less..

I just don't see how less power going to parts is going to make them fail...
Click to expand...

I have.. It depends on how the psu dies.. Sometimes they die spectacularly, in a blue flaming light show.. Bathing the inside of your case with sparks, leaking electrolytic fluid, and melted plastic..
That is a rarer type of death than the, it just stopped working type, thankfully... :)
 
I wanna see that :D

As long as it's not my computer and I don't have to fix it :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top