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Holy Crap!! My power supply mobo connecter is burned up!

S

Salvador

Diamond Member
My work system has been acting flakey lately randomly rebooting. I was going through the process of elimination trying to find out what was wrong when I started to smell something. Something was burning inside the case. I turned off the pc, opened it up and couldn't see anything. I was thinking that it must be the power supply because the power supply is one of the possibly culprits when the pc randomly reboots. Plus, it smelled burnt when I put my nose up to it.

I went to pull the power supply and try one that I had lying around when I noticed that the plug from the power supply that plugs into the motherboard has about 5 melted connectors. The recepticles on the motherboard side are burned as well.

Question: Do I dare try plugging my spare power supply into the motherboard with the burned recepticles or should I consider the motherboard shot? I hate to ruin a power supply trying it.

What do you think caused this? The power supply or motherboard?

TIA,

Sal
 
Originally posted by: Salvador
My work system has been acting flakey lately randomly rebooting. I was going through the process of elimination trying to find out what was wrong when I started to smell something. Something was burning inside the case. I turned off the pc, opened it up and couldn't see anything. I was thinking that it must be the power supply because the power supply is one of the possibly culprits when the pc randomly reboots. Plus, it smelled burnt when I put my nose up to it.

I went to pull the power supply and try one that I had lying around when I noticed that the plug from the power supply that plugs into the motherboard has about 5 melted connectors. The recepticles on the motherboard side are burned as well.

Question: Do I dare try plugging my spare power supply into the motherboard with the burned recepticles or should I consider the motherboard shot? I hate to ruin a power supply trying it.

What do you think caused this? The power supply or motherboard?

TIA,

Sal
Click to expand...

Not really possible to tell easily. The MB could have developed a short (thus pulling too much current through the PSU and melting the connectors and who knows what else), or the PSU could have flipped out and put the voltage too high on some of the rails (doing pretty much the same thing). If *only* the motherboard showed damage, I would tend to suspect the motherboard itself rather than the PSU, but both should probably be replaced.
 
The motherboard is capable of causing something like this to happen, but usually it is the power supply. From what you described it also appears that the power supply was giving too much voltage due to the connectors being melted on the power supply connector to the motherboard.
 
The motherboard is capable of causing something like this to happen, but usually it is the power supply. From what you described it also appears that the power supply was giving too much voltage due to the connectors being melted on the power supply connector to the motherboard.
Click to expand...
That's what I thought. After looking at it more closely, there is no way that I'm going to attempt to use this motherboard again.

Thanks guys!

Sal
 
A likely cause is poor or intermittent contact beween the board connector and the ps cable. This causes arcing which can burn or melt the contacts. this can sometimes be remedied by crimping the females (an interesting thought, don't you think?) to make better contact.
 
My wife's quickbooks computer at home had the same problem. Her system was rebooting randomly, the HDD would be "invalid" occassionally, or apps would crash. I took her PC apart and found the discolored ATX12 connector. I bought her a new Antec PSU and that fixed EVERYTHING. I figure her system is good for a few more years now. :beer:
 
Yeah, you can clean up the contacts in the mobo connector, put a new PSU on there and it should work fine. Probably either loose or corroded contacts or loose wire-to-contact crimps on the PSU side. The connectors most of them use are so cheap it's a wonder they work at all. Almost nobody uses real Molex or Amp contacts any more, just cheap chinese knock-offs.
.bh.
 
A likely cause is poor or intermittent contact beween the board connector and the ps cable. This causes arcing which can burn or melt the contacts. this can sometimes be remedied by crimping the females (an interesting thought, don't you think?) to make better contact.
Click to expand...
I don't see how it was a poor connection. It snapped in there tight and has been running like this for a couple of years. I just think that the power supply went haywire or something. It was a cheapo brand that I had never heard of. Foxlink?

I don't know how I could reuse this mobo. The male part of the plug from the PSU is all melted inside the female connector on the mobo. I guess I can try and pull out my dental picks and see if I can get that stuff out of there. I took some photos. I just need to upload them somewhere.

Luckily, I had a spare mobo and power supply to use for now to get it back together. I also just bought another Antec SLK2600AMB at Newegg yesterday for $55 shipped. I'm going to transfer everything over this weekend. The case with power supply was only $14 more than the PSU itself. Doh!

Thanks again!

Sal

 
Yes, that was caused by loose or corroded contacts. All it takes is just the correct (very small amount of resistance) between the contacts or at the place where the wire is crimped into the female contacts to do that in a high-current circuit. I once had that happen at a drive connector - the insulation on the 12V wire had melted halfway back to the PSU...
. It is also partly due to reliance on the 5V circuits to power the CPU even though AMD has recommended powering the CPU from the 12V rail at least since the Athlon came out. And the use of cheap chinese contacts.
. Am I right in guessing that yours was a Socket-A mobo without a P4-12V (4-pin square) CPU power connector? Those are always the ones in which this problem occurs. Easily solved by buying ONLY mobos that have the P4-12V connector which are now more common on socket-A mobos. This not only nearly eliminates the possiblity of your problem, but also results in a more stable system which can easily run from a lower power PSU. Win, Win, Win!

. And ctually you have that backwards - Male/Female is determined by the contacts, not the shell. So yes, if you pick the excess plastic out and clean the Male contacts in the mobo shell with contact cleaner (I use a folded pipe cleaner to get down into mine), it will work fine. Anyway, congrats! Those are the worst looking I've ever seen!!! Usually the shells are just blackened and misshapen - not totally gone...
. You also need to crop those pix down tight and drop down to 256 colors and higher compression - no reason to have 'em larger than 10k files. Take pity on us modemers. I use IrfanView to manipulate/convert my pix. Takes all of 15 secs to cut almost anything to an under 10k .jpg for these types of uses.

.bh.

Where's the :sun: ? Well, here it comes!
 
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