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My old server PSU finally gave out after 8 years
Had a 700 watt power supply in my home server that started making a clicking noise last Thursday. Pulled the logs and saw voltage drops on the 12v rail for about a week before it fully died. Anyone else keep old power supplies running way longer than they should?
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willow4071mo ago
...that clicking sound is the fan bearing going out, not the PSU itself usually. I've had that happen on a couple of old Corsair units and just replaced the fan for like $15. But you saw actual voltage drops on the 12v rail? Did you catch what the voltage dipped down to? Because if it was dropping below 11.4v or so, the caps were probably swollen and about to pop, which is a completely different problem than just a noisy fan.
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kim_west1mo ago
Right, that voltage drop is really the key part. If the 12v rail was sagging down into the 11.2v or 11.3v range under load, the PSU was probably on borrowed time. I had an old Seasonic unit do the same thing, started getting random restarts in games, checked the voltage and it was bouncing all over the place. Replaced the whole unit before it could take out the motherboard or the GPU with it. Those caps can bulge out the top or leak a little brown gunk, but sometimes they look fine on the outside even when they're bad, so you really gotta check with a multimeter.
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johnson.daniel23d ago
Man I feel that, my multimeter spent more time living on my desk than in the toolbox during my last build. Turned out I was just measuring the fan voltage wrong and felt like an idiot for a week.
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