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Lightly Used 8-9 year old Seasonic PSU still good?

TheWai
By TheWai
in Power Supplies
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Go to solution Solved by mariushm,
2 hours ago, TheWai said:

So I just opened up the psu... There were more screws holding down the fan than I expected So I didn’t remove it. However, I didn’t even need to remove it to see something that looked alarming to me. In the pictures below, the capacitors in the side seems to be surrounded by this white gum material and is tilted. Does this mean it leaked? How is it still running with stable voltages LOL. Now I’m scared to even turn it on.

That actually looks really good, nothing to worry about. 

 

That white stuff is a rubber like material the manufacturer (Seasonic) pours around big components and wires and the material acts like a vibration dampener and also holds those components and wires in place, preventing them from coming out of the holes in the circuit board. 

The big components and the wires are soldered to the circuit board using a process called reflow - the circuit board is placed in a frame which then travels over some smaller rollers into a machine a machine which then pushes up hot liquid solder onto the bottom of the circuit board, like a water fountain. The liquid solder sticks to the leads and the wire ends and solders them to the circuit board. 

That liquid jet of solder can push up quite a bit, so in the process the thin lightweight wires that are just sitting there inserted into holes in the circuit board could be lifted up, and then the wire would not end up soldered properly, so by adding a bit of that material, the wire is glued in place and guaranteed to be soldered properly on the bottom of the board.

The capacitors are too heavy to be pushed up, but as they're so tall, the vibrations from those small rollers as the circuit board goes into the machine can cause the capacitors to shake from side to side and one or both short leads could get out of the circuit board holes. So by adding a bit of that material, they lock the big capacitors in place.

This white glue can then remain to continue to give the power supply protections against vibrations, against mechanical shocks (like for example a box full of power supplies being thrown from a truck down onto the pavement when they reach a store)

 

The capacitor that's not sitting vertical is used to smooth the voltage on the -12v output, which is only used for serial communication. It could probably even be missing, and you wouldn't notice it, because you probably never used the serial ports on your motherboard (if the motherboard even still has these on the IO shield and not just as a header)

So it's really nothing to worry about. 

 

The capacitors are KZE series from United Chemi Con, which is a very good Japanese manufacturer of capacitors (those the capacitors are probably made in Taiwan or China factory of theirs) and KZE series is very good, reliable, with very good properties (good temperature rating, endurance etc)

They're looking very good, you can tell that the top vents (the Y engraved in the tops) are looking good, they're not swollen, so visually the power supply is in great shape, from the pictures I see.

 

The fan color bothers me, but if it spins well and doesn't vibrate or cause issues, it's probably fine. I don't think the fan has a connector, so if you want to replace it you probably have to cut the leads and attach the leads from the new fan to those wires (either by soldering or by twisting the wires and isolating them with some electrical tape... soldering would be ideal, would make it look professional)

 

 

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@Turbof1 Thanks for your reply! Happy to keep discussing with you, but I think this topic is starting to branch off from my original post. I've made another thread under the GPU forum. Let's continue chatting there! Link to that page is here: 

 

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1 hour ago, TheWai said:

Nope, no overclocking from my end but it might come factory overclocked. I am using a ASUS Dual OC GTX 1060 6gb. It's the one with the white shroud and two fans. So I replaced the thermal paste yesterday and reseated the card. The existing thermal paste did look a bit on the dry side, but not as bad as pictures I've seen online. I cleaned it off and applied new paste and did another run today. It last much longer, but the same thing happened after an 1hr 20min with temps maxing out at 70.

 

So I used MSI afterburner and bumped up the voltage by 10% and maxed out the power and temp limit while keeping the clocks the same. I also tweaked the fan curve. Temps actually dropped from 70 to 64. However, after about 20-30 minutes, it got the black screen crash again.

 

Would it be possible that the riser cable on my vertical GPU mount is contributing to the issue? I'm going to install the gpu directly into the motherboard and try again, but would that even be a possibility?

Oh that is the exact same card I have in one of my pc's! That card is extremely overclockable, and in normal conditions the factory overclock should not be giving any issues whatsoever.

 

I am not sure if it is the riser cable, but try it out regardless. Keeping the amount of variables low as possible is always a good thing during trouble shooting. If it still happens, last resort would be to put the card in a friend's pc and see if the same crash occurs.

 

It's likely something on the card is causing this. A resistor/capacitor getting too hot or something. Unfortunaly that is out of my ball park. The card might still run fine during gaming; Unigine Heaven is quite taxing on the card; you might not experience issues during gaming.

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7 hours ago, Turbof1 said:

Oh that is the exact same card I have in one of my pc's! That card is extremely overclockable, and in normal conditions the factory overclock should not be giving any issues whatsoever.

 

I am not sure if it is the riser cable, but try it out regardless. Keeping the amount of variables low as possible is always a good thing during trouble shooting. If it still happens, last resort would be to put the card in a friend's pc and see if the same crash occurs.

 

It's likely something on the card is causing this. A resistor/capacitor getting too hot or something. Unfortunaly that is out of my ball park. The card might still run fine during gaming; Unigine Heaven is quite taxing on the card; you might not experience issues during gaming.

I see, that makes sense. I actually bought this card off of someone, and he says he has never had these issues. We’ve kinda became friends during the process and keep in touch so I don’t think he’s lying to me. He also is just a casual gamer and never ran any benchmarks so it could be what you’re saying and I wouldn’t see these problems in game.

 

Anyways, thanks for the help!

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