I have a three-year-old PC with a Corsair AX760i 760W power supply. It was a premium model at the time (2015), costing $183.
I left the PC plugged-in, but shut down, for a couple of days. When I returned and powered it up, the machine died after about 10 minutes of use, as suddenly as if there had been a power failure. After that, it wouldn’t start at all, seeming to start up and then shut down repeatedly at 1-2 second intervals. I left it unplugged overnight and the machine booted up and ran just fine all day.
I am thinking that it is time for a new power supply. In theory this thing has a warranty, but how can I live without it for days? Maybe they offer advance replacement? But how do they know it is actually broken and it isn’t something else shutting down the PC?
[Readers: Anyone have an idea for what could be wrong other than the power supply?]
Let’s assume that it is in fact time for a new power supply. The same company, Corsair, makes multiple 750-watt model: Bronze ($80), Gold ($130), and Platinum ($180). What is the conceivable practical difference among these? Will it be fan noise? They all claim to be quiet at idle, which is where my PC lives 99 percent of the time (Adobe Premiere compressing videos is my only heavy load). The high-end ones are slightly more efficient? But who cares if the PC is seldom under high load?
Thanks in advance for brilliant insights!
[Separately, I can’t see anything about today’s PCs that is significantly better than what I purchased three years ago (for a little over $2,000). The consumer (non-Xeon) motherboard in my desktop holds up to 128 GB of RAM (32 GB currently populated). Most of what’s in the market today seems to max out at 32 GB or maybe 64 GB. How is it that so many brilliant engineering minds can’t make something that inspires trade-ins?]
Efficiency level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Plus
It’s a way to milk a few extra bucks from people who feel bad about the ice caps melting.
Have you tried cleaning out the PC case and power supply? IE, blow it out with compressed air (outside!) to get rid of any dust, pet hair etc. It’s possible your power supply is bad, but what you describe is quite typical when airflow/cooling is impeded and some kind of thermal protection is kicking in.
It’s of no interest to a PhD in EE, but get a power supply you can hack to provide voltages over 12V. Then, when the computer becomes obsolete, you can power LED strips & battery chargers.
Thanks, Jim: I’m sure it is kind of dusty in there, but thermal overload is not consistent with it running for the last couple of days continuously, is it? It shut down after just a few minutes before and then couldn’t restart.
I downloaded Open Hardware Monitor. Everything in the case seems to be at about 40C, including the CPU cores. The GPU fan is at 7% speed.
It’s probably the power supply. Corsair gives you the option to have the replacement power supply sent and then you mail in the defective one. They will probably charge you for the replacement until they receive the old one. PC components are now so power efficient that power supply efficiency barely matters. The Corsair Platinium and Gold PSU are a lot more expensive due to them being fully modular (excess cables are detachable for people who care about what the inside of their case looks like) and the Platinum one has some extra monitoring software. There’s no reason to get an expensive power supply most PCs don’t use more than 500 watts while under full load and they sip power when you’re just in the browser.
There hasn’t been really much innovation in PC components for probably the past 5 years. AMD’s RYZEN CPUs have cut about in half the price of high core count consumer and enthusiast CPUs (6-16 cores) and graphics performance is improving but quite frankly unless your someone that does use their PC for 3d modeling and video editing every day there’s been no reason to upgrade. Dell and HP better hope VR catches on so general consumers finally have a reason to buy a new computer. Although, somehow Apple every year convinces its customers to spend over $1500 on a laptop for watching cat videos and writing emails.
There is a Microcenter in Cambridge.
http://www.microcenter.com/category/4294966654/Power-Supplies
They have a ridiculously generous return policy.
I would not buy another Corsair. I have heard good things about Seasonic.
https://pcpartpicker.com has tools that let you enter in your components and calculate how much power you need. There is the issue of various voltages and whatnot. Google “rail power supply” to get up to speed on that.
https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/power-supply-specifications-atx-reference,review-32338-2.html is the first useful hit I got.
I would say you got too much of a beast for your rig. You would not put an aircraft engine in a car, though Bill Cosby had a funny routine about that scenario.
What causes most electronic components to fail is not heat, per se, but changes in temperature. Things expand and contract and break, like asphalt subjected to cold winters and hot summers. Thus the problem after you let the PC cool down.
Jim might be on to something. I wonder if your CPU fan went on the fritz. What you describe does sound like a thermal shutdown. I had similar problems when I tried running a cpu without a fan. Also, when a power supply fails, you can usually smell it.
Take the whole PC over to Microcenter and talk it over with them. Diagnosing this stuff blind is hard.
I wonder how many of the guys with portraits on the walls there you know on a first-name basis.
Let us know how it works out.
That type of startup cycling is consistent with the PSU failing or with power fluctuations from the power company (unlikely or you’d probably see lights flickering etc.) It’s hard to diagnose PSU failure conclusively without a second PC or PSU to confirm the failure
The differences between PSUs are mostly stability of the rails under load, useful with high end parts, overclocking, and multiple video cards. And modularity and convenience as Jonah mentioned.
I usually buy Antec, but Corsair and EVGA make good PSUs as well.
Also, from my perspective most of the recent innovation in PCs has been in video processing. For a gaming rig the price of the video card(s) can easily exceed 50% of the whole PC. The onboard memory size and speed of the cards has increased pretty dramatically in recent years. Still, that is the the aspect most often limiting performance.
I could stand to upgrade my 5 yr old PC, but to my knowledge they haven’t achitected out the Spectre and Meltdown issues. I don’t want to spend a penny for some PC with a cob-job work-around. Maybe I missed an announcement and current chips are fixed.
@Isaac: Efficiency can be self-interested too – you pay for that wasted power, then you pay more for A/C to remove the heat it added into in your office. But the biggest savings might be that higher efficiency often correlates with higher-quality components which means longer working life before you pay to replace it.
It is a shame that the price jumps are so big between each step though.
Allow me to give a ringing endorsement to Scott Mueller’s book, Upgrading and Repairing PCs, now in its 22nd edition. The hard copy of the book comes in handy when devices fail.
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It is well written and as authoritative as you can get.
The key difference being sold is AC/DC conversion efficiency. Bronze will consume 10% more AC power than Platinum for the same DC load. There are other less important differences. See the 80 Plus descriptions for all the details.
For most buyers it then becomes an issue of how much time the system is powered on, what its internal DC load is, how many years you will use it, and what your AC electricity costs. Do the arithmetic and maybe the higher price of the Platinum is justified. Don’t forget to factor in added air conditioning and reduced heating demand where appropriate.
Does sound like thermal shutdown. Had a case a few years back where the CPU fan/heatsink just got slightly loose so it was no longer in contact with the CPU. This was enough to send it to shutdown, even after less than a minute.
Might be worthwhile to open the case and check if the CPU heatsink is in place.
Thanks, Tiago. I don’t see how it could be a thermal shutdown from a temp probe near the CPU because it would shut down only about one second after trying to start. There wouldn’t have been time for any of the stuff that monitors things beyond the power supply to start up, would there?
[Separately, Corsair turns out to have pretty good customer support. They answered the phone quickly and approved an advance replacement. Unfortunately the exact PSU is no longer made so they are digging around for a bit trying to find a current alternative.]
I have exactly the same symptoms and a situation with my Dell desktop which is out of warranty. Same just turned off by itself last week and would only come up for a few seconds. Then left it disconnected for awhile so it came back for an hour or so.
So I grabbed my older Thinkpad which was sitting on a shelf, plugged it in and now it’s power supply died too. Heated to very warm first then just stopped charging… luckily my Mac still works. And luckily there is Amazon with a 2-day delivery.
Is it Russians hacking the power grid / supplies lol?
For me, I like Coolermaster. But they’re all the same I reckon. When my mum’s power supply on her PC that I built six years ago failed before anything else, I was insulted. For a handy tool, suggest you google “logical increments”. Building your own pc has never been easier.