- Nov 28, 2004
- 13,346
- 1,146
- 126
I was building a new cruncher this afternoon (new motherboard from Foxconn - got it for less than USD10, an old AMD Phenom 9850, 4GBytes RAM, one HDD, one DVD, a new GTX450 - got that for USD 58) when suddenly there was a shotlike explosion in the computer room, where I was working.
I looked around, the router was OK, the visible computers too (checked quickly), the fan, the heat exchanger, all seemed working.
The I noticed the "burned insulation"-smell coming from under the table.
Under the table - well ventilated - was one of my more powerful crunchers (AMD 9950 @ 3.5GHz + ATI 5850) and it was not working.
The smell came from this cruncher so I pulled the power plug, the connections to the KVM and the LAN-cable. When I looked inside (I ran that comp without the side panel because of the huge Noctua cooler) I noticed that the PSU not longer looked as before - the case of the PSU looked somewhat skewed.
I took the comp to my work bench, tried to remove the PSU but it is stuck. So I just connected a new 750W PSU and started the computer. It booted into Windows, and started crunching BOINC using the CPU (all cores) and the GPU. I checked it carefully (stress test after checking all the voltages) and it runs well. I then shut down the computer.
The problem: I can not remove the old PSU without using force. The case is built like a Russian WWII Tank ... and I will probably have to use quite a lot of force, which means that I will have to remove the CPU-HSF, the HDDs (all 4 of them), The DVD-RW ...
... but not today.
I have never seen something like this. What inside the PSU would generate such force? Especially considering that there are such big "holes" in the case (the rear ventilation grill, the fan-intake is 120 mm). Any ideas?
Edit: Pics added - see below!
I looked around, the router was OK, the visible computers too (checked quickly), the fan, the heat exchanger, all seemed working.
The I noticed the "burned insulation"-smell coming from under the table.
Under the table - well ventilated - was one of my more powerful crunchers (AMD 9950 @ 3.5GHz + ATI 5850) and it was not working.
The smell came from this cruncher so I pulled the power plug, the connections to the KVM and the LAN-cable. When I looked inside (I ran that comp without the side panel because of the huge Noctua cooler) I noticed that the PSU not longer looked as before - the case of the PSU looked somewhat skewed.
I took the comp to my work bench, tried to remove the PSU but it is stuck. So I just connected a new 750W PSU and started the computer. It booted into Windows, and started crunching BOINC using the CPU (all cores) and the GPU. I checked it carefully (stress test after checking all the voltages) and it runs well. I then shut down the computer.
The problem: I can not remove the old PSU without using force. The case is built like a Russian WWII Tank ... and I will probably have to use quite a lot of force, which means that I will have to remove the CPU-HSF, the HDDs (all 4 of them), The DVD-RW ...
... but not today.
I have never seen something like this. What inside the PSU would generate such force? Especially considering that there are such big "holes" in the case (the rear ventilation grill, the fan-intake is 120 mm). Any ideas?
Edit: Pics added - see below!
Last edited:
