How long do you think till this thing blows up?

[Pentium4]

A customer brought in his computer because it wasn't working properly and had viruses. Even if it's unrelated I always look at the power supply first, and when I saw that LC in the model number, naturally reacted "oh shit...."

But anyways, I fixed the no boot issue and viruses. I then called him and told him I highly recommend he get a new power supply because the one he had was probably going to blow up soon. He insisted that the one he had was fine and that he "just bought it new and installed it 3 weeks ago" Well....not exactly brand new and the warranty sticker was already broken which is why I took some pics. Besides the normal horrible build quality the main thing I'm worried about is it only has a Mospec 10A fast recovery rectifier on the 12V......The rest is a 16A fast recovery for 3.3V, 30A schottky for 5V, two C4106 switchers. YC and Jun Fu caps

It has to power:
Pentium 4 S478 3.2/512/800 (82W TDP)
4 sticks of DDR 400
Asus P4G800-V motherboard
2 DVD drives
1 IDE HDD, 1 SATA HDD
AGP GeForce 6200 256MB video card
1 floppy drive, 1 external card reader
3 PCI cards
120MM Fan

Do you think this thing will fail soon? I think it will....since it's an old system it works pretty hard in Windows 7 and that CPU usage is usually very high. if anything the ripple is going to be high, the caps will fail and that poor 10 year old motherboard is going to get stressed pretty hard...

[dmill89]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

Oh Dear, another Deer (L&C).

I wouldn't expect it to last long at all. At best it will run really hot and kill the caps fast, at worst it will fail in a spectacular fashion and take everything else with it. The 10A fast recovery on the 12V rail is of particular concern. An 82W TDP CPU will draw nearly 7A by itself at 100% load, throw in a video card, motherboard, drives, etc. and the 12V rail is likely at max load or overloaded most of the time. It may handle this for awhile but will definitely not be stable long term and of course the ripple will likely be through the roof.

[Pentium4]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

Oh Dear, another Deer (L&C).

I wouldn't expect it to last long at all. At best it will run really hot and kill the caps fast, at worst it will fail in a spectacular fashion and take everything else with it. The 10A fast recovery on the 12V rail is of particular concern. An 82W TDP CPU will draw nearly 7A by itself at 100% load, throw in a video card, motherboard, drives, etc. and the 12V rail is likely at max load or overloaded most of the time. It may handle this for awhile but will definitely not be stable long term and of course the ripple will likely be through the roof.

Exactly what I was thinking....at least the heatsinks are better than a lot of L&C's I've seen but yeah this thing kicks out a lot of heat...

[SuperDuty]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

I have two of those ! One is an "Heden" branded variant. I got it in a case back in...2003. It still works and served me well in Socket A rigs until 2010 at least...it does have a buldged cap. Rated at 350W...sure sure. It does have a little bit more components than this one.
I also have another one, "ACC+" branded, with a much improved filtering, a true 4A bridge rectifier, a bigger ERL35 transformer, a pair of 13009 on the input, but it still has the 10A super fast on the 12V... rated at 380W, I'd say 300W at best.

[prongs12]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

the secondary caps will mostly blowing up first... even without see the details i could guess the caps value

you could see the most common damage caps below.. and the value

[Pentium4]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

I have two of those ! One is an "Heden" branded variant. I got it in a case back in...2003. It still works and served me well in Socket A rigs until 2010 at least...it does have a buldged cap. Rated at 350W...sure sure. It does have a little bit more components than this one.
I also have another one, "ACC+" branded, with a much improved filtering, a true 4A bridge rectifier, a bigger ERL35 transformer, a pair of 13009 on the input, but it still has the 10A super fast on the 12V... rated at 380W, I'd say 300W at best.

And you're on 230V so they'd do better in general. Lucky!!

the secondary caps will mostly blowing up first... even without see the details i could guess the caps value

you could see the most common damage caps below.. and the value

Yeah, those were 2200uF caps. And who knows how much wear was already on this thing so they could bulge any day now

[Pentium4]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

Guy brought his computer back in cause he wasn't getting video, I wonder if the ripple killed the old video card? He wanted a new AGP card and still didn't want to replace the PSU. It has an X1300 Pro now....

[momaka]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

I give it a year at the most. With that high of a load on the 12V line, this thing will heat up quite a bit inside - even if the fan is wired to run on 12V all the time (and if the fan is wired to run on 12V all the time, then the fan will likely fail before the caps do). I doubt the output caps will last long, especially considering their brands. Moreover, you got those big load resistors right next to them... as if the heat from those undersized rectifiers isn't enough already .

Guy brought his computer back in cause he wasn't getting video, I wonder if the ripple killed the old video card? He wanted a new AGP card and still didn't want to replace the PSU. It has an X1300 Pro now....

Tell him the power supply killed the old video card and that the warranty sticker on the PSU is broken so he didn't actually get a new PSU. Hopefully that should get him to reconsider.

[Pentium4]

Re: How long do you think till this thing blows up?

Yeah it kicks out mega heat! And it's one of those pathetic little fans that just says "Sleeve Bearing" on it, no info or anything!

He is set in his ways, won't take my advice...