Power Supply?

[Sam443]

Ok heres the story. I have an AMD Athlon 550 processor, 128 meg ram, ATX MB, and it seems like my power supply burnt out. For the past few days, I've smelt a burnt electricity smell from my computer. I have a 250 watt power supply in there, and according to the company, that's enough. From what I've heard, a 300 watt P/S is needed for the Athlons. Anyway, this morning, when I turned on my computer, smoke came out of the P/S fan and it has a really bad burning smell. Nothing came on. No indicator lights, no fans, nothing!!! I went to the store and purchased a 300 Watt P/S and replaced it. I'm still haveing the same problem. Absolutely nothing is coming on. I've seen a lot of mobo, processor and ram problems and I've never seen anything like this. Could the mobo and/or processor have burned out with the P/S?

 

[DaddyG]

Power Supplies burnt up pretty frequently, especially none name brands. Get one from the AMD approved list and you'll be OK.

 

[Ulysses]

Check this to test your new PS. Or check this troubleshooting guide.

 

[jamarno]

A 250W power supply should be able to power a 550 MHz Athlon, at least if you don't load it down with several hard and CD drives. Of course you did first test it with nothing hooked up but the motherboard, video card, memory, speaker, and keyboard, right?

I'd look for a short between one of the motherboard's copper traces and the chassis, but another possibility is that one of the numerous bypass capacitors on the board has shorted.

Switching-mode power supplies inherently shut down when they fail or are overloaded, even if a transistor shorts in the process. So smoke indicates a bad design or a failure in the part ahead of the switching section.