PSU fried?

[dreamliner77]

[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]
So I have a Silverstone ST50F in one of my builds. I bought this PSU shortly after it hit market (about 6.5 years ago, I think). It's been through two hardware revisions and is currently powering a AMD 960T unlocked to 6 cores on an Asus mobo, 2 hard drives, 1 SSD, 2 optical drives and a USB 3.0 card. Prior to that, it powered a AMD 3000 Brisbane that was OC’d to 3.1 GHz (I think). The computer usually only sees about 60 hours of time on per week.

Over the course of the last 3 months or so, there’s been lag between hitting the power button and the machine powering on. At first it was only about 10-15 seconds so I really didn’t worry about it. Now it can take well over 5 minutes. I’m thinking caps or something in the PSU have gone bad. Once booted, the system is still rock solid.

I’m assuming I should just throw another PSU in but I hate to spend money when I don’t have to![FONT=&quot][/FONT]

 

[LeeJend]

6.5 years on a commercial power supply is about end of economic life. They can last longer but like you said the quality of the aluminum electrolytic cap's is the key driver.

On the other hand, start up delay is not typically an aging power cap issue, though it could be an atypical issue. (Smoke and flames is typical.)

Aged aluminum capacitors can partially reform when low voltage is applied to them for a while. If that is what is happening the supply is dead, time to replace it since this failure mechanism can't be identified by bulging and leaking capacitors. Even if you could find the bad one finding "computer grade cap's" to replace them could be a problem (maybe digikey).

Considering the smoke and flames thingy with bad power supplies I'd bite the bullet and spend the money to replace it. :cry:

 

[dreamliner77]

Pretty much what I thought. Initially I was amazed when I thought how old this PSU was. I've just left the computer on for the past two weeks but I think I'll order a new PSU tomorrow. I'm slightly amused that this model is still available. I might just buy another one.