Guide: Howto kill your expensive PSU

[Wolf2000me]

Hey,

2 days ago I managed to instantly kill my PSU using nothing but a 3.5" floppy drive.

Look at the attached picture. Remove the FDD connector, move it one pin to the left and reattach.

Press the power button and watch the lights go out in your room :S

--------Disclaimer!------
Wolf2000me is only responsible for wasting his own expensive PSU


edit: It was an OCZ modstream 520W.

[Áedán]

A shortcircuit should not kill your PSU. Your PSU should detect an overcurrent situation and shut itself down.

[Got EpOx]

Sad to hear that dude hope it wasn't super expensive.

[skool h8r]

The worst i've done is kill a floppy drive by ataching the power clip the wrong way round, my brother actually, he messes around with my system way too much.

[JimF]

How did the Power Supply react - was this a meltdown or just the big sleep ?

[Wolf2000me]

It was a big sleep. The electricity on several rooms here upstairs fell out.
After I switched back the electricity in the rooms my machine did nothing anymore. With a new PSU i'm okay. Every other component of my system is okay. Even the floppy drive is still working as it should
I tested my damaged modstream but nothing helped.
I paid 116€ for it last year.

[Áedán]

!! The PSU should NOT have failed that way - basically, it sounds like the high voltage side of the PSU failed and shorted out the mains. If it's still in warrenty, I would return it. If not, I would speak to OCZ about it.

A short on the output of the PSU should never cause that kind of catastrophic failure!

[Áedán]

In case you're wondering, here's what OCZ say on their tech specs for your now dead PSU.

Originally Posted by OCZ

Technical Specifications
160x150x86 mm
95~132Vac / 190~264Vac 10/6a
200~240Vac Only**
450W: +3.3V(28A), +5V(45A), +12V(26A)
520W: +3.3V(28A), +5V(52A), +12V(28A)
Over-voltage/Short-Circuit protection

Emphasis mine. It should not have failed simply because you shorted it.

[Wolf2000me]

Originally Posted by Áedán

!! The PSU should NOT have failed that way - basically, it sounds like the high voltage side of the PSU failed and shorted out the mains. If it's still in warrenty, I would return it. If not, I would speak to OCZ about it.

A short on the output of the PSU should never cause that kind of catastrophic failure!

You always do seem to be able to bring good news

I've been breaking several things lately which voided warranty that i kind of added this one to the pile already

Thanks man

[cloasters]

Ouch! Sorry to read about this catastrophe. The power plug on the floppy as well as the connector for it are keyed, I guess this doesn't prevent one from connecting only three pins though. Call me old and slow, but it just doesn't pay to hurry.

[Allan]

Sorry to hear about the dead PSU. A good friend of mine found another way to kill a PSU: Flicking the 230V/110V switch on the back of the PSU, and then press the power button.

[danrok]

Originally Posted by Allan

A good friend of mine found another way to kill a PSU: Flicking the 230V/110V switch on the back of the PSU, and then press the power button.

THey should mark the switch "self-destruct", juts to make its function a bit clearer!

[Favu]

Does it look like this?

[Wolf2000me]

Originally Posted by Allan

Sorry to hear about the dead PSU. A good friend of mine found another way to kill a PSU: Flicking the 230V/110V switch on the back of the PSU, and then press the power button.

That's how I killed my first PC component when I was 11

[Gizmo]

Stick a paper-clip through the fan and use it to try to rotate the fan blade (because the fan has frozen up). If you do it enough times, you'll short the heat-sink on the switching FET to the case and blow the PSU.

Don't ask me how I know that.

[cloasters]

Originally Posted by danrok

THey should mark the switch "self-destruct", juts to make its function a bit clearer!

Shazam, I didn't know that the voltage selection switch was a grenade, so to speak. Fortunately, most of them require a scewdriver to select the required joltage. So -how do you make the change so as NOT to harm the PSU, when you've selected the wrong voltage, and then change it back? It's not like a European voltage source is handy in Canada, and vice versa.

[Gizmo]

For 115v systems, the 115/230v switch is fairly harmless. In the 115v position, it connects to a full wave bridge rectifier which effectively acts as a voltage doubler. In the 230v position, it connects to a half-wave rectifier and passes the voltage directly in. This means that the internal switching regulator is always running from something in the area of 160-240v, depending on what input configuration is like.

If you have the input switch set for 230v operation but plug in 115v, the input voltage is passed straight in, the switcher gets what effectively amounts to a brown-out condition and shuts down.

Now, if you have the input switch set for 115v operation but plug in 230v, the input voltage goes through the voltage doubler and becomes something around 340v or so, and blows the switching transistor and associated logic. Pretty lights, lots of blue smoke everywhere, and the PSU no worky no mo.

A lot of the better PSUs either have automatic input voltage sensing and switching or are designed to operate across the entire input voltage range between 115v and 230v (some of the ones I used to design would operate continuously from 90v to 260v; meeting the German TUV regulatory requirements on those was murder).

[Áedán]

From the PSUs I have disassembled so far, I've noticed that they're designed to put a voltage of approximately 340V across two capacitors in series. If you're in a 230V country and you set that switch to 115V, that means those poor capacitors end up with about 650V across them. From PSUs I've seen that have had that happen, the insulation in the capacitor usually fails first, shorting out the mains...

[jnansley]

Guys, I've done the floppy power trick several times with much cheaper power supplies and they always shut down. I'd be a little suspicious of the (complete lack of) short-circuit protection on that particular PSU and RMA it due to failure, since, well, it did fail.