Question Was the PSU the culprit?

[rh71]

I have a Rosewill 600w PSU ordered from 2008 that I'm thinking of re-deploying in a new build... PSUs are crazy overpriced right now though I did order one anyway, but then found this Rosewill in the basement. So my hesitation is this old piecemeal'd PC was my kid's and 2 years ago while he was playing Roblox, it had some kind of short and it literally started smoking from the case's pin wires that attach to the mobo (HDD LED, PWR LED, SPKR, etc.). Those wires were burned to a crisp. I then built him a new PC and put this all aside.

If there's any chance at all it was a bad PSU / PSU going bad, I'll scrap the idea...

 

[thesmokingman]

Do you need us to tell you that it's a bad idea? If so, yea it's a bad idea.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Considering that those front-panel pins carry a bare minimum of power over them, and every one of them includes a ground, that must mean that the ground plane shorted out pretty badly, somehow, and yes, most likely the PSU is the culprit, so NO, I wouldn't re-use the PSU from that build.

My personal experience with some Rosewill PSUs hasn't been great. I used a Capstone 600W or 700W PSU in a friend's gaming build, to replace a different one that went bad. The Capstone has a 5-year warranty (long, for Rosewill, most are 1 year, which is actually pretty telling of their PSUs overall), and Jpn caps. Well, it didn't last a year, on a moderately-clocked Skylake quad-core and RX 470, SSD, HDD, build.

If that was their cream-of-the-crop PSU, or one of them (Photon being the other, or maybe their Hercules PSU at the top, being 1600W), well, not sure that I want to experiment with their lower-tier PSUs.

Had a Glacier DOA on me, have had OK luck so far with their Valens 600W Gold, friend has one of those, as do I in a mining shell, after an EVGA 500B or 600B went on me while mining. Had OK luck, too, replacing a neighbor's PSU with a Rosewill RD400 or 450. Those entry-level PSUs are OK, for basic desktop boxes.

But their "Gaming" PSUs, hmm, not so happy with them.