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Rant: Power supply took out my whole test bench yesterday
I was testing a client's old HP desktop and the PSU decided to blow a capacitor. Took the motherboard and GPU with it, plus my spare SSD I had plugged in. Cost me around $400 in parts to replace everything. Anyone else had a bad PSU cascade fail like this before?
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tyler621d ago
Hang on, hold up. Five hundred sixty hours? That's barely broken in, that's like a month and a half of solid running for a test bench that's used daily. I've had CX600s that ran for years without a hitch in customer builds, but 560 hours ain't some kind of magic number that proves anything. That's not a flex, that's just getting started. The real issue here is way bigger than a dust bunny or some cheap power strip. I've seen a perfectly clean, well-fed CX600 just decide to let the magic smoke out for no good reason. Corsair makes decent stuff but they ain't perfect, and neither is any other brand. A bad cap can happen straight out of the box, and then it takes your whole rig with it. That's just the reality of electronics, sometimes you get the unlucky one.
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Five hundred sixty hours of runtime on a Corsair CX600. That's what my shop's test bench has seen. No failures. Not even a flicker. People blame the PSU but they never check their own wiring. That old HP you tested, bet it was dusty inside. Maybe you plugged a cheap power strip into a daisy-chained outlet. Manufacturers put protection circuits in for a reason. Capacitors blow when something else already went wrong upstream.
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johnson.daniel23d ago
People always want to point fingers at the PSU first because it's the easiest thing to swap and blame. But I've seen so many builds where the real issue is just a bad solder joint on a cheap extension cord or a wall outlet that's loose and arcing. Modern PSUs have overvoltage and short circuit protection for good reason they're trying to save your parts from YOUR mistakes. If you pull a dusty old HP out of a closet and plug it in without cleaning it first that dust can hold moisture and cause a short. A CX600 isn't some top tier unit but it's solid enough for a test bench if the rest of the setup is clean and wired right. Bet your shop kept that on a decent surge protector and not some dollar store power strip daisy chained off a space heater.
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