This evening I went into my computer room to find a strong 'burning plastic' smell. After shutting down my secondary PC (which I'd left on to share the Internet using the Nintendo Wifi USB connector), I had a sniff around and found what I believe to be the source of the smell, the PSU on my secondary PC.
I opened up the PC to check for any visible signs of damage. There is nothing on the motherboard or any other device that looks burnt, and all the capacitors (Rubycon!) are nice and flat-topped. All vents on the PC and PSU were clear, not blocked by anything and relatively free of dust.
I also opened up the PSU. Again, there's nothing visibly wrong - no charring, burning or melting was visible. The capacitors are all Samxon, and show no signs of bulging.
Then again, it did only have one input capacitor and wimpy heatsinks, but this PSU has served me well for a long time. The PC is not showing any bad cap symptoms yet (random reboots, POST errors and such), but I dare not keep it switched on for extended periods of time any more.
One thing I did notice - when I opened up the PSU, a tiny metal fragment fell out, that looked rather like an end of component lead with a bit of solder on the end. Could a component have come loose and started arcing? Surely there would be some physical evidence if that were the case, though...
This particular PC gets much less use than the other one in the computer room, so it's also possible that dust settled inside the PSU and made the smell when the heatsinks got hot. What do you guys think?
I opened up the PC to check for any visible signs of damage. There is nothing on the motherboard or any other device that looks burnt, and all the capacitors (Rubycon!) are nice and flat-topped. All vents on the PC and PSU were clear, not blocked by anything and relatively free of dust.
I also opened up the PSU. Again, there's nothing visibly wrong - no charring, burning or melting was visible. The capacitors are all Samxon, and show no signs of bulging.
Then again, it did only have one input capacitor and wimpy heatsinks, but this PSU has served me well for a long time. The PC is not showing any bad cap symptoms yet (random reboots, POST errors and such), but I dare not keep it switched on for extended periods of time any more.
One thing I did notice - when I opened up the PSU, a tiny metal fragment fell out, that looked rather like an end of component lead with a bit of solder on the end. Could a component have come loose and started arcing? Surely there would be some physical evidence if that were the case, though...
This particular PC gets much less use than the other one in the computer room, so it's also possible that dust settled inside the PSU and made the smell when the heatsinks got hot. What do you guys think?
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