Power supply, overload?

[FishTankX]

Okay, so here's the lowdown.

Got my friend setup with a nice load out for a pre fab'd system

480 watt antec earthwatt
-i7 920
-Radeon 4850
-Bluray drive
-1 7200RPM harddrive
-8GB of RAM

Those are the relevant components

Now, he was using it in a non gaming capacity for about 3 days, and the power supply just went belly up. Replaced it with an 800 watt but now the videocard isn't outputting signal.

Does this combination sound like a situation for a power supply overload, if it was largley used for a webbrowsing/DVD playing capacity? It just seems SO bizarre to me that this was within ATi's specifications, and it failed within a non gaming scenario.

 

[Lunyone]

First off, I don't know of a 480w Antec Earthwatts PSU. I know of a 430w (30A on the 12v rails) and a 500w one, but either should easily handle your setup.
Getting to your question: I think that you might want to double check that everything is plugged back in, especially the 6 pin PCI-e power connector on the 4850 GPU. If that all is good than you might've had power spike when the PSU went out that might've taken out the GPU. If you have a spare system lying around or one that you can test the GPU out on, than I'd try that to verify it's operation.
It might also help if we knew your full specs on the build, especially the mobo make and model. There might be other things that we can look into if we know a bit more about your build.

 

[Proximon]

I believe the EA430 was called 480W for a while. Or there may have been a separate 480. In any case, the load would not have been so much that the PSU would blow up. You must have had a faulty one.

 

[Modelworks]

Well no hardware is perfect. Even companies like Antec has products that fail. Someone has to get those bad apples out of the bunch, unfortunately it seems it was you.

Easiest way to see what is wrong now is to swap out the card into another system.

 

[Beanie46]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Well no hardware is perfect. Even companies like Antec has products that fail. Someone has to get those bad apples out of the bunch, unfortunately it seems it was you.

Quite true about some things do get by and fail at the end user. Had an Antec Signature 850 die in less than 2 hours of use, just quit....no "magic smoke" let out, no drama, no sparks...just refused to turn back on after working perfectly for a couple of hours.

Such is life.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Well no hardware is perfect.

Nope. There is always a failure/defect rate, no matter how little.