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Power Supply Failure (PSU) - Symptoms & Solutions | PC Maintenance - YouTube
Channel: ITProTV
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Without a power supply running properly,
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our PCs would just sit there,
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but how do we know if we're having power supply issues?
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Let's take it to the bench, ask Wes, and find out.
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Hey, Wes, I want you to know I put my detective hat on
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because there's something going on
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with someone's PC who shall remain nameless.
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Okay.
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And it might be related to the power supply.
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So symptoms of power supply issues,
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how do we find those symptoms?
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How do we know it might be the power supply?
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I'll tell you. One of the telltale signs is the fact that
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when you press power on your computer, nothing happens.
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I figured that was something.
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Yeah, it's not always as easy in being fair.
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No, it's not always that easy.
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Sometimes you might have a power supply that's failing,
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and when that happens, it fails to deliver
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the proper power outputs to different devices.
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And you might see like intermittent symptoms
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where maybe you get a crash if you have like,
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for instance, you're launching up
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a very intensive graphical type application
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where maybe your graphics card
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isn't being powered to its fullest.
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You might get a random reboot,
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you might get a system lock up.
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For the most part, a lot of times what you're going to see
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is just a failure to boot in general.
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A spinning beach ball of death might happen to it.
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Oh no, in fact, when we talk about that,
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it might just be the fact that literally,
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you hit the power button, and absolutely nothing happens.
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It doesn't turn on, no hard drive LED light indicator
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like the drive, none of the fans are spinning,
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or you might actually say where the fan spin,
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but it still doesn't come on.
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So those are usually kind of the telltale signs.
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You might get some kind of, we say, spinning beach ball,
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that's typically a Mac thing.
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If you're talking about where we've been more in the PC world,
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if it's a Linux system, it might be a kernel panic,
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which they're pretty much all kernel panics,
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they're just proprietary crash screens.
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In the Windows world, it would be the legendary BSOD
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or blue screen of death.
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Spinning Cheerios is what I was referring to.
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Yes, there we go. Absolutely.
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Yeah, it certainly could happen.
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Yeah, okay. Well, all right.
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So some symptoms, what's the causes?
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What's happening? What's going on?
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Okay. Well, there could be a few things
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that are potentially causing the problem.
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If you are looking at power issues, it could be the fact
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that maybe your power cable isn't plugged in,
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it could be just as simple as that.
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Have you moved your desk lately?
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I know that when I have a PC like this, in fact,
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I had a PC next to my desk for a very long time,
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didn't move it at all, but went to move the desk one day
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and after plugging different things in and you just kind of,
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it gets to become a big rat's nest back there
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or unplugging a device.
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I had a top mount power supply.
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Like, for instance, we'll see in this one,
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this one's a bottom mount power supply.
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And unplugging one of the USB devices
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pulled the power cord out of the back.
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Moving the table, the desk that it was at,
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kind of shimmied the power cable so it wasn't properly seated.
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So those are very basic things
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and they're really not power supply issues as more
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as they are more of like an operator error.
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And again, I don't mean that facetiously,
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I just mean that it's not really
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the internal component that's failing.
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Could it be the power strip you're using
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or a surge protector or something?
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That is a great thing and I'm glad you mentioned that
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because that is especially,
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here in Florida we get two seasons,
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we get hot and rain and rain usually comes with light.
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If you don't like the weather, just wait a minute.
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That's right. Wait, five minutes, it'll change.
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So if a power surge does happen
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and it trips the power surge or the surge suppressor,
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it could trip the fuse that's in it.
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And that could be a problem.
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Or it could be just the fact that maybe it's turned off,
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maybe that you've kicked the power adapter
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if it's not a surge protector or even if it is,
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if it's just a normal power strip, which is really just a way
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to add more devices to a single AC outlet.
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That could be the problem, really.
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It could be the AC outlet.
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One of the things that I do when I'm testing that out
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if I want to figure out if the power supply issue is,
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let's take a lamp, you turn it on
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and then unplug it from its power source
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and bring it over to the same AC outlet
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that your computer's plugged into and plug it in.
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If the light comes on,
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then you know the AC outlet is working.
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It's a real easy way if you don't have
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a voltage detector or something
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because a lot of people don't have these things
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just laying around, it's a real easy way to test an AC outlet.
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Other things that it could be too.
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It could be, we've talked about the loose main power connector.
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Well, I've talked about the external power connector.
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If you're working inside of the PC, it could be something
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like the internal main power connector.
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If you're putting everything back together
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and it's not fully seated into that 24-pin connector
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which most people are running the ATX standard today.
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That could cause problems as well.
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Other minor things that can happen,
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some of the older power supplies,
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they have a voltage selector switches
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and that's called input power selectors.
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And these are little red, like dials that you can select
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or switch that you can usually take a screwdriver
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and you can move it one of two positions, 115 or 225,
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which is really just 110 and 220 in the European nations
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here are the European states and stuff that used to 220.
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And if that selector switch
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isn't on the right appropriate voltage selection,
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then it could be an underpowered machine.
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It could cause issues.
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The other reverse of that is if it's expecting
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to have an input power of 115
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and you put it on a 220 circuit,
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you can just fry the power supply.
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I didn't mention this one symptom,
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and it is a symptom of a failing power supply.
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If you smell burning plastic or a burnt smell,
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that could be a symptom of a power supply issue.
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And I say that from kind of personal experience
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again living here in Florida.
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Lightning strikes happen
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and one of my friends had a workstation
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and she went out for a little bit
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and it was raining and everything come back
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so that our computer wasn't working.
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Just asked if I would take a look at it.
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And when we opened up the computer,
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you really didn't even need to open the computer up.
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You can just kind of smell it.
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You could smell like burnt electrical.
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And that was just because lightning had struck her house.
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And it, unfortunately, electricity kind of like
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water follows the path of least resistance.
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It followed down our electrical current, down our lines,
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and it actually ruined a couple of things,
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one of the things being her PC.
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So, the input power supply switch.
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Now there's other switches too
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that you can have on power supplies as well,
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and it could be just an on-off switch.
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I've done that too where I push the workstation back
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and again, cables on the back of the PC
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turns that power switch off.
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And unfortunately, you're going to think
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that your power supply is bad,
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but really, it's just an on-off switch.
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Goodness gracious me.
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Well, okay, now all that being said,
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and there is quite a bit of it there and thank you very much.
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How do we fix this?
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What are the solutions, some of the solutions we can look at?
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Sure. Let's start with visual inspections first.
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That's one of the easiest things to do.
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And then it's not really, it's a smell.
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The sniff, scratch and sniff.
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If you could smell burn, something burnt in your computer.
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That's a pretty telltale sign that especially
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if it comes to the power supply.
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Now, I will tell you, sometimes that's hard to isolate
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because it could be a capacitor on the motherboard.
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You've got VRM or voltage regulator modules
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on your motherboard too,
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ensure that the power is stepped down
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to the appropriate voltages.
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So one of the things to determine
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whether it's a power supply
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or something in the motherboard,
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you might actually have to disconnect all the connections,
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pull the power supply out,
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and kind of smell that by itself, if you will
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because sometimes it might be hard to tell.
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Again, one of the easiest visual inspections,
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if we take a look here on the back of this computer,
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you can actually see that this has got
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one of those on-off selectors
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that I was telling you about as well.
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And if it's turned off, it's like a light switch,
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it's not going to bring power into the system.
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So again, just pay attention to that.
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That might be one thing.
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Some of the other power supplies,
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you'll see that little red notch here that I've told you about
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where it's a selector switch
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and it's usually got 110 or 115 on one side
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and then 225 on the other side, and then you just flip it.
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Those are fixed input power supplies,
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and they don't do the auto arranging like this one does,
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and a lot of the newer ones do.
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So you may have to worry about that on some older ones
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and more modern models, they can pretty much…
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what they can do is they can detect
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the voltage that's coming in
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and they can work with whatever the voltage is.
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So that's really one of the easiest things that we can do.
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before we even get into the computer, right?
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Let's see the easy, simple solutions first, check your AC outlet.
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I've already kind of told you how you can do that
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without having any voltage detector.
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Check the surge protector.
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Make sure that a fuse isn't blown in the surge protector.
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If you've just got a regular power strip, just make sure
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that the on-off switch hasn't been kicked off.
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Again, I probably shouldn't admit to this.
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I've done that more often than I really should admit to.
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Now, when it comes to getting into the computer,
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that's going to be a little bit different.
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Oh, okay.
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Well, I noticed one more thing to hear
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is we've got this just kind of dangling here.
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I'm guessing that might be an issue.
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Yeah, that might be an issue.
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Well, the reason I've got this out
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and I'm glad that you made note of that
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is because we are dealing with power here,
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and you want to utilize proper electrical safety here.
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So what I'm going to be doing
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is I'm going to be disconnecting some connectors in here.
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So I've disconnected the power from the power supply
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and also up here on the top of the box here in this one.
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Check your vendor.
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Here is the power switch.
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And I'm actually I don't know if you can hear that.
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I hear it.
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I'm holding that in and I'm going to try to dissipate
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any excess power that's in the power supply
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because you don't want to shock yourself.
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No, no.
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We want to make sure that we're again exercising proper…
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Safety first.
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…safety, exactly.
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So we've done that, and we kind of take an overhead view here,
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we'll see there's two connectors
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that I really want to disconnect.
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And then what we're going to do
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is we're going to pull these through
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the back of the computer
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and we're going to put them on a power supply tester.
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These are the CPU connector here,
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and then the other one that I'm going to do
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if I kind of move this, you'll see this is the main power connector.
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That's the 24-pin connector.
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So what I'm going to go ahead and do
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is I'm going to take these two connectors
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and I'll take my light here,
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and we'll kind of put that to the side here.
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And go ahead and turn that off, get that out of our way.
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And then what I'll do is I'm going to just unplug these
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and when I unplug them,
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I'm going to feed the main power supply connector
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through the back.
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And what we're going to do is we're going to put these
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on a power supply tester.
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Now, you could do this with the altimeter.
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I actually have a different…
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let me move this a little bit to where I can see it.
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I have a thermal take.
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It is a universal ATX power supply tester.
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And that's what we're going to use
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to actually test these components now.
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And that's not relatively expensive, is it?
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Well, this one was about 40 bucks.
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It's not really bad.
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If you work as a tech,
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I would definitely suggest you invest one of these.
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Now, what we're going to do here, too.
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And you know what, Zack,
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I'm going to pull that camera out of the way.
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Sure.
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We're pretty much done with this.
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I'm going to pull this what I call spaghetti out of the back.
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A very colorful spaghetti.
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Yeah, it is.
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So we've got and let me just undo some of the cable routing
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because remember, this episode is more about
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testing the power supply than it is the cable routing.
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That's right.
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And what we end up having here, Zack
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is all of our different connectors.
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Now I'm going to take my power connector here
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and I'm actually going to plug this back in
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and we're going to turn on the power supply.
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Now at this point, ATX Standard says
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it's got a certain pin in here,
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if it's not connected to the motherboard,
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the ATX power supply will not turn on, all right.
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And that's just a safety mechanism.
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Now, if you can hand me that thermal take.
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This is a multimeter, not a multimeter, excuse me.
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This is a universal ATX power supply tester.
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And if we kind of take a look at this from the top here,
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you're going to see
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that it's got a few things that we can do, all right.
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We can plug-in from the top all of our different connections.
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We've got a PCIE connection,
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we've got the old four-pin Molex connector.
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And then we also have our PCIE connector.
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So CPU connector, we've got our Molex connector,
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on the top, this small little plastic blade,
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not really much to see there.
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That's our serial ATA connector.
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And then finally, we got PCIE.
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And then if I turn this around,
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you'll see there's that 24-pin connector.
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Yes.
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Now what we want to do is we're just going to take this,
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we're going to take the 24-pin connector,
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and let me see if I plug this in the right way here.
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The good thing is it's keyed, it's notched,
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you don't have to worry about it.
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Notice it comes on right away.
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That's what we want to see.
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I'm not going to do the diagnostics yet
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because what I want to do
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is I want to take the CPU connectors, all right.
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And you can just pay attention,
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there are marks on these right at the top
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so you know exactly how they go in.
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And what I'll do is I'll just kind of plug these in here,
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and that's all I'm doing.
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You can hear it. The beep.
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Actually, the beep is a good thing.
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Beep is a good thing.
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I'll come back to what that beep actually means in a second,
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just as soon as I get these plugged in.
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So now we've got our PCIE, our CPU, our 24-pin connector,
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but we got a couple of other connectors that we want to test
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and these are going to go through
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and test every single one of them.
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I'm going to put on our blade connector for serial ATA,
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and then finally, you can see where it's almost like Twister here.
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You were right, it was spaghetti.
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It really is.
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So then the next thing I'm going to do
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is I'll plug in our Molex connector up here
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towards the top right, provided I can get one
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that's not going to give me a hard time.
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And the good thing is they are arranged
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to where you can't put these in backwards,
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even though there's a notch
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on the blade connector for Serial ATA,
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it's pretty straightforward on how to get these in here.
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Now I say that and the Molex connector
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is kind of giving me a hard time.
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Now, if I can move these out of the way,
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what we want to end up seeing here,
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let me go ahead and cut a cycle through these.
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And there you'll be able to see it like that.
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Now, what we have here is if we click this the first time,
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what you're going to see is that it is telling us
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this is our 24-pin connector here.
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And what we can see is the 5 volt rail,
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the 12 volt rail, and the 3.3 Volt rail.
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These are important, all right,
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because these are the three rails or the voltages
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that are in this computer.
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And if you look, they're within their tolerance ranges.
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Now these voltages, if you get a power supply that's failing,
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they're going to be considerably lower.
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Considerably lower.
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Pay attention to your vendor,
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and the reason I say that is because notice this says 12.1?
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It's supposed to be 12.
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Is that bad?
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Well, no, it's not bad.
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It's not bad at all. It's within its range.
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There you go, it times out.
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So but so it's within its range.
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This is a power good signal and according to the specification,
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anything between 100 and 500 is good.
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This just says, Hey, you got good power
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and this is how many milliseconds.
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And then the next thing we'll do is we'll click.
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And what it'll do is it'll go to the next rail,
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and this is telling me right here
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that this is PCI or PCIE, excuse me.
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I know it says PCI on there, but technically it is PCIE.
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And notice it says 12.1 volts,
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and again, so it's supposed to be 12 volts,
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it's within its range, it's giving good power.
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And then the next thing we do
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is we'll just click through the next one here,
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and notice that tells me the CPU.
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The CPU voltage up here, that's also 12 volts,
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that's what we want to see.
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And then if we go through the next one here,
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you're going to see this is the four-pin Molex connector.
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This was used on older parallel ATA drives,
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not really used too much
[988]
as far as the parallel ATA drives go today,
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but you still use them for things like system fans.
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And notice that it's got a 5-volt and a 12-volt rail,
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well, we're seeing it's within its ranges.
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Even if it was a little bit less, that would be perfectly fine,
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but I'm actually surprised and very happy
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with this power supply that not only is it hitting the range,
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it's not deviating at all.
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A little bit, but a little bit more.
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And then the last one here we do this one more time.
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This is our serial ATA and that's got all three rails in it.
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You can see we have the 5 volts, we've got the 12 volt,
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which again the 12-volt rail seems to be running
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just a little bit more, which is not bad, and then 3.3.
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So that's essentially how you can test your power supply, right?
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And I really like this device.
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Now, you can see me struggle with it for a little bit.
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I feel like there’s a lot to struggle with.
[1037]
There is, but we also want to make sure
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that you can see it real well, too.
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And one of the reasons I like this type of device is,
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yes, you can use the multimeters,
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but then you're going to have…
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and certainly there's nothing wrong with a multimeter,
[1048]
but a multimeter, you're going to have to go in
[1049]
and you're going to have to figure out which wire does what
[1051]
and what voltage it should be
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and what the tolerance ranges are.
[1055]
With this, you can take one of these power supply testers,
[1057]
you plug them in and then you look at the manual,
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you find out a lot like Intel specification is
[1064]
and you can tell what those tolerance ranges are.
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And you can find it out very fast,
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you don't have to worry about which wire does what
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because you can only plug it in one way
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and then you click through the interface.
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Very easy to do, and it's very quick
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that you can find out whether your power supply
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is performing the way you want it.
[1081]
Well, Wes, I and my power supply thank you very much.
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