Help, anyone. I dont know what to do anymore. I recently built my own computer to sell. It had a 430W PSU in it. I brought a wireless internet adapter for it and a few cooling fans. I switched it on, ran normaly for about 20 seconds and smoke came pouring out the PSU. I unpluged it immedantly after that.
I brought a new PSU 500W (dont know why i didnt go higher) but i did, when i finnished installing it, it had problems turning on and stuff. When it did come on, it made a poping noice and again smoke poured out. After that i was real angry.
Third time buying, and this time a 1200W PSU, I thought i couldnt go wrong with this one. When i installed it, it was running fine, not a problem at all. Gave it a week and still was running good, then one afternoon when i was about to pack it up in the box, thought i might give it one more test. I switched it on, but when i plugged in the VGA cable while the computer was running it just turned off. Turned it on again and AGAIN the smoke came pouring through,
also killing my motherboard my CPU and wireless adapter.
After a long strike of anger i decided to give up building computers forever. But why did this happen? please i need to know why. If anyone knows or you think you know please comment.
Thanks.
It sounds like your mother board is sitting directly on the chassis without the spacer posts or that something is touching the surface of the motherboard and is causing a short. Also it is possible that you have a wire tucked out of the way but it is running through something sharp on the chassis or is pinched between components when you tightened things down. Another possibility is that you mixed up similar connectors, possibly front panel connectors, and that is where the problem is. The next thing that comes to mind, is that you used a conductive thermal paste and put on way too much in installing the CPU heat sink and your short out is there (or a heatsink backing plate was installed without insulating spacers). Finally, there is the possibility (remote but possible) that you have a bad motherboard from the start, but this would take a lot of investigating and eliminating of all other possibilities first, but if the board is now fried, you may never know for sure if you do not find something that definitely looks like a major error on your part. Take this as an expensive lesson and an opportunity and investigate as thoroughly as you can (maybe get a friend to help) to see where/if you went wrong.
Technically, this should be in the Hardware forum. Nevertheless, you didn’t mention any of the manufacturers of the power-supplies in question (many of them significantly over-state their wattage). But if you blew up 3 of them, then likely something is seriously wrong with your build. The obvious (original problem) would be hard or intermittent shorts or a seriously underrated supply (which you should have determined before your next P/S purchase). You could have damaged something else somewhere in the system (leading to the 2nd and 3rd ones failing), or the short still existed.