What to do when you first see signs of a Power Supply dying out slowly?

[phil7990]

System:

-Case: Aerocool GT-A white (6 years old)
-Fans: 2 top, 1 frontfan and 1 backfan
-HDD: (unknow brand but it is +/-9 years old)
-SSD: 240 gb (4 years old)
-CD Drive (4 years old)
-PSU: Corsair CX750 green (6 years old)
-Mobo: Z170 a gaming (4 years old)
-CPU: i7 6700 (non k) (4 years old)
-CPU cooler: Stock intel i7 cooler (4 years old)
-RAM: HyperX 16 gb (4 years old)
-GPU: XFX RX 590 Fatboy (1 year old)

So my PSU is 6 years old now and it gave first signs a month ago: no keyboard, no mouse and no screen when booted and rebooted couple of times, eventuelly he got through.

I know the power supply won't last forever. I don't want to damage my system, however I don't have the extra money at the moment, so unless it's really really urgent, I want to wait till december.

Is this possible? What do I do to prevent damage to my system? Not run aaa games anymore till december? Don't use the pc as much? OR does this not matter at all?

HWinfo

https://gyazo.com/8a67757df61b000eb8b6272b9a8995d1
https://gyazo.com/df3ce1cf02e44ead6ea0bc03963c3c60
https://gyazo.com/01aff26573135c58307797ce670050f8
https://gyazo.com/02d93c66d9693fff9b18845ee7537e40
https://gyazo.com/28bb11dc128db91805d38379834f6599

[Enderman]

How do you know it's the PSU?

[SupaKomputa]

My PSU usually goes down suddenly without any signs.

The problem might not be PSU.

[Praesi]

As i expierenced it, a PSU doesnt die slowly. Its BAM and dead.

[mariushm]

A power supply will typically not slowly die, it will either die or not.

 

There is one exception. The power supply has a tiny circuit inside that's like a mini power supply inside the power supply, something like a phone charger, a circuit which provides 5v stand-by power to the computer even when the computer is off.

 

Because this tiny power supply inside the power supply is running 24/7, one of the components in this circuit can degrade due to heat much faster than the rest of the power supply (as the rest is well cooled by fan, those can last decades)

 

So if this is the case, this 5v output from the power supply can fluctuate a bit, depending on how much it's taken by the components.

From this 5v stand-by, you have the chipset and possibly the usb keyboard and mouse powered.

What can happen is something like this: Before you push the power button, the chipset measures the voltage and sees 5v and says, everything's ok, let's power the computer up and starts to load the BIOS code, and sends commands to components to start up. But, all this means there's some amount of power consumed, which could make the tiny 5v stand-by power supply oscillate and the voltage may temporarily drop to 4.5v or even less and the chipset spots that and says "hey, something's not right, better shut down everything" and that's when the computer turns off or resets.

 

What can fail in that circuit is an electrolytic capacitor, which stores and smooths energy.

You can see it in the picture below,  between the two big transformers with green tape on that, that round brownish part :

If you see the top of that component swollen or cracked, you can replace that capacitor with a proper low esr one (or go to a pc service/repair place to replace it) and psu should be like new. Same for those round black capacitors above the yellow wires - they smooth the 12v and 5v and 3.3v voltages.

 

 

 

So what you could do is open the power supply and visually inspect and

 

[phil7990]

36 minutes ago, Enderman said:

How do you know it's the PSU?

 

34 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

My PSU usually goes down suddenly without any signs.

The problem might not be PSU.

It must be. Can't be anything else. How can all the rest of my system die so quickly? Can't be my ssd either. If it would be, it would say something in the lines of can't find hard drive or something. It would just say something in white text. I only had a black screen with nothing on it and no mouse or keyboard.

 

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

A power supply will typically not slowly die, it will either die or not.

 

There is one exception. The power supply has a tiny circuit inside that's like a mini power supply inside the power supply, something like a phone charger, a circuit which provides 5v stand-by power to the computer even when the computer is off.

 

Because this tiny power supply inside the power supply is running 24/7, one of the components in this circuit can degrade due to heat much faster than the rest of the power supply (as the rest is well cooled by fan, those can last decades)

 

So if this is the case, this 5v output from the power supply can fluctuate a bit, depending on how much it's taken by the components.

From this 5v stand-by, you have the chipset and possibly the usb keyboard and mouse powered.

What can happen is something like this: Before you push the power button, the chipset measures the voltage and sees 5v and says, everything's ok, let's power the computer up and starts to load the BIOS code, and sends commands to components to start up. But, all this means there's some amount of power consumed, which could make the tiny 5v stand-by power supply oscillate and the voltage may temporarily drop to 4.5v or even less and the chipset spots that and says "hey, something's not right, better shut down everything" and that's when the computer turns off or resets.

 

What can fail in that circuit is an electrolytic capacitor, which stores and smooths energy.

You can see it in the picture below,  between the two big transformers with green tape on that, that round brownish part :

If you see the top of that component swollen or cracked, you can replace that capacitor with a proper low esr one (or go to a pc service/repair place to replace it) and psu should be like new. Same for those round black capacitors above the yellow wires - they smooth the 12v and 5v and 3.3v voltages.

In this case, I'll just wait untill I can replace my PSU. I'm not advanced at all in these things.
I do wonder, could it be a connector problem or something? Cause I saw if all of  them were stuck properly onto the motherboard which was the case. Maybe the connectors didn't had enough power to fully power up the motherboard?

 

Also, when  the PSU does die, does this damage the other components? If it does, then I might consider getting the PSU earlier...