When a power supply goes bad does it just usually die?

[SteveGrabowski0]

My system wouldn't POST the other day after a crash. After some troubleshooting I seem to have narrowed it down to either the gpu (GTX 970) or the power supply (Antec Neo Eco 620C, based on the Seasonic S12II 620), as when I remove my 970 and plug in my old low power GeForce 8400GS my system works fine. Now I had never seen artifacting out of my 970 or any kind of crashes, though I haven't gamed on it a lot the last couple of months (not since playing the brilliant Resident Evil 2 remake). So it surprises me that it could be my 970 that's bad. But I'm wondering if the PSU is a reasonable culprit too? All my fans, disk drives, and so on spin up fine and the system like I said is usable now with my GeForce 8400GS. But I'm wondering if maybe a capacitor blew in the PSU and it's not capable of producing the power needed to run my system + GTX 970 but it is enough to run my system + GeForce 8400GS since the 8400GS is about a 40W gpu while the 970 is a 150W one. Are PSU problems an all or nothing thing usually? I probably can't test the gpu in another system nor test another high power gpu in my system until later this week.

[Nexxt]

The power supplies that I've had blow, resulted in complete failure on the PSU's part. You mentioned that the system does not POST and your testing suggests a GPU failure, nothing else. The only way to tell for sure is as you say to either test with a different PSU, or the GPU in another system.

[Ankerson]

Test them and let us know.

[SteveGrabowski0]

4 minutes ago, Stru said:

The power supplies that I've had blow, resulted in complete failure on the PSU's part. You mentioned that the system does not POST and your testing suggests a GPU failure, nothing else. The only way to tell for sure is as you say to either test with a different PSU, or the GPU in another system.

Sadly what I have been expecting. PSU is so much cheaper to replace and I hate buying a new GPU the year before a next gen console launch (look how bad Kepler aged once the new gen hit). Prob just buy a crap $35 GT 710 (no igpu on my cpu) and be a strictly console gamer until I can see what Cyberpunk 2077 needs to run well on PC next gen.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

When a power supply goes bad does it just usually die?

Nope.

 

Only occasionally do they completely fail.  Usually you have intermittent issues or the PSU starts killing your other components.

 

[Stefan Payne]

24 minutes ago, ReggieGRS said:

That true for all PSU? I heard good quality units "fall on their own sword" when they die

Depends on the age and how they fail.

 

High Side MOSFET in DC-DC Section -> everything on that line gets 12V, pretty bad.

Capaciots fail -> Ripple through the roof. If you don't detect that soon enough, Components will age dramatically/die.

5VSB Fail: Depends on the Circuit. The older Circuit goes wild and can go through the roof. 17V on 5VSB is possible. That would be fatal. The Chips don't seem to cause Issues.

 

There are other possibilitys as well that might or might not happen. 

[SteveGrabowski0]

6 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

Depends on the age and how they fail.

 

High Side MOSFET in DC-DC Section -> everything on that line gets 12V, pretty bad.

Capaciots fail -> Ripple through the roof. If you don't detect that soon enough, Components will age dramatically/die.

5VSB Fail: Depends on the Circuit. The older Circuit goes wild and can go through the roof. 17V on 5VSB is possible. That would be fatal. The Chips don't seem to cause Issues.

 

There are other possibilitys as well that might or might not happen. 

 

6 hours ago, jonnyGURU said:

Nope.

 

Only occasionally do they completely fail.  Usually you have intermittent issues or the PSU starts killing your other components.

  

Shit. Now I'm completely lost. So it can be normal for a bad psu to fry only one component? Everything else in my system seems fine though the gpu I'm using right now doesn't use external power, so I'm not using the two 6-pin power plugs I had connected to my 970.

 

I haven't noticed any kind of intermittent problems. It was just this one time. And the gpu wasn't under any kind of load at the time. I was doing a windows update for adding Japanese keyboard support and windows update crashed. Nothing weird happened graphically. Windows update crashing kept me from launching explorer and I couldn't shut the system down normally. So had to do it with the hold the power button for 8 seconds method. When I powered back on I could not POST until replacing the GTX 970 with the GeForce 8400GS. Man I wish I had some idea of how to know when a PSU is having problems, because my brother wants to lend me one of his 1080s but no way I want to test a possibly sketchy PSU with a card that expensive.

[SteveGrabowski0]

On 5/22/2019 at 11:33 AM, Ankerson said:

Test them and let us know.

Since you asked after trying a new psu it looks like the GTX 970 was the culprit, since my system wouldn't post with the new PSU + GTX 970 either. On the other hand I needed a new psu anyways since my Antec Neo Eco 620C is almost five years old, so replaced it with a Bitfenix Formula 450 Gold which seems to be a really well regarded unit. I'll probably wait until Cyberpunk 2077 launches to buy a new gaming gpu and just game on consoles until then since I'm not paying $500 for an RTX 2070.