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Had a weird power supply failure on a Dell OptiPlex 3080 yesterday
The machine would turn on for two seconds then shut off, but the power supply tested fine with my basic PSU tester. Turns out the 12V rail was dropping under load because of a bad capacitor I couldn't see without taking the unit apart. I swapped in a spare 260W unit from my bench and it booted right up. Anyone else run into PSUs that pass a simple test but still fail when you actually put them in a system?
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rubyl356mo ago
A basic PSU tester missing a bad cap is actually kind of scary. It makes you wonder how many "good" units are really just waiting to fail. Those testers give a false sense of security.
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gavin_reed6mo ago
Yeah, saw a forum post where a guy's tester said all good but his PC kept crashing. Opened it up and a cap was clearly busted. Makes you second guess everything.
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taylorhunt5mo ago
My old Corsair unit passed a basic tester but would reboot under load. I finally hooked up a cheap digital multimeter to watch the 12 volt rail while gaming. The voltage would dip below spec every time the GPU drew power, which the simple tester never caught.
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