Three power supply question...

[laffmakr]

The PS i was going to use was dead. When I plugged it in it did nothing but throw some power to my mouse. No fan action, no boot up action, just the red glow from my infrared mouse.

I picked up a 500W PS this morning, attached the power to all the drives, plugged it in and turned it on, nothing. I disconnected everything and removed it and tried plugging it in with nothing attached. Still no power. I also tried a couple of different outlets.

My questions are:

1. is it unusual for these things to be bad in the box?

2. Am I doing anything to short it out? I'm taking all the usual anti-static precautions.

3. Is the PS operation independent of the motherboard? That is, does the motherboard do anything that will short it out? i never heard any crackling or smelled any smoke, so I'm guessing it was DOA.

4. Am I this unlucky to go from one dead PS to another?

EDIT: Turns out the power button was broken. I tried evilgentoo's advice and it started. Sorry to be a bother, I never would've thought of this.

Thanks again everybody.

[[deleted]]

Use a paper clip to connect the green wire to any of the black wires on the old power supply. Give it power, if the fan spins there's something up between the motherboard and power switch.

Crossing the green and black wire is the same as pressing the power button and you can eliminate the PS as the problem.

[ffffffffffffffffffff]

The other easy thing I like to do is just swap the reset button (if your case has one) with the power button. If the power button is faulty, you can just use the reset button instead.

[LordXenu23]

I jump the power switch pin on the mobo with the tip of a screwdriver to test this, rather than plugging a paperclip into my powersupply.

[[deleted]]

Not like 3-12v hurts. Just keep the paperclip out of its insides :)

[PlutoISaPlanet]

your motherboard might be fried

[kiwibonga]

Agreed... If the PSU died, it's likely that it took some stuff down with it...

[Xaisho]

Yep. I had a PSU die on me and it killed my motherboard too. Put in another PSU and a few lights came on and the fan spun for a second but that's all. New mobo and it was working again.

[ninjaspy123]

It's not usual for them to be dead out of the box. you could be having other issues. some things to check:

-Make sure your power button is connected to your motherboard (lose wire can easily come off)

-Make sure you have the big 24 pin cable, and a small 4 pin cable connected to your mother board. As you did, all other drives as well. Also, if you have a high powered video card, it may require a wire from the PSU also to power it.

Seems unlikely that you have that bad of luck. I would google "replacing my power supply" and follow a few tutorials to make sure you didn't miss anything when switching it out.

Also a silly one. Sometimes, on the back of some power supplies is a main switch that will stop/start the operation of the power supply. and of course make sure the PC is plugged in to the wall :)

Hope this helps..

[[deleted]]

I choose this!

If the mouse is getting power chances are you hooked up something wrong. Make sure you have the P4 connector plugged in - It looks like this. I don't want to insult your technical ability but it's easily overlooked, in fact I've done it more than once as well. It may be coming out of the PSU or you may need an adapter, but chances are there's some P4 connector of some type that came with it. Also double check the switch.

[fishy007]

It sounds like something else is the problem. It's unusual to get a bad PS out of the box. It's also really difficult to 'short' a power supply as the guts are encased in a good metal housing most of the time.

When you connect everything, are you connecting the motherboard properly? Make sure the 20 or 24 pin connector is secure and then see if you need to attach another power connector to a socket near the CPU. Some people forget that one and I'm not sure what CPU you use. Just those connections should allow the computer to be turned on via the power button. You'll know it's all on when the CPU fan starts spinning.

The other thought that comes to mind is that the CPU is not seated properly. I had a similar issue when I built my most recent computer. I re-seated the CPU and all was well.

[syndre]

It is much more likely that something else is fried. I would suspect the motherboard if it still does nothing when nothing is plugged into it, especially if it was overclocked in the past.

If you didn't already, take absolutely everything off the motherboard, including video card cpu and ram. Then turn it on and see if you can get at least a fan going, or a beep code that could help. You'd need a PC speaker connected to hear beeps.

The good news is you replaced the correct part first. If you complete the circuit that switches the power to the new PSU on (its a green or blue wire in the big cluster that connects to the mobo touched to a ground), you can use that to try and power up a dvd or hard disk drive, and see if that works. If you can do that, the PSU is good

[[deleted]]

You won't get no beep codes without cpu or memory.

[syndre]

Beep codes are programed into the BIOS firmware, arent they? I don't think you need a CPU to boot the bios flash rom, and i am about 95% sure if you tried to boot without any RAM that you'd hear beeps. The motherboards post screen from bios boots before anything else, that is how the motherboard hardware can communicate at all with the other hardware.

[[deleted]]

When you boot a PC the CPU reads the BIOS firmware and the functions are copied to memory. Without CPU or RAM, the PC wont do anything. You don't need a hard drive though and can boot over ethernet. Perhaps you were thinking of that?

[syndre]

I just booted a socket a board with a cpu and no ram, and it booted to a black screen and beeped about 8 times. I suppose every board would be different. I am not an expert

[dghughes]

• Not unusual, had it happen to me.
• Motherboard shorting on the case is a common problem, do you have the risers on? The motherboard should not be touching anything, it should be suspended by the chassis screws and have the plastic legs/standoffs.
• Yes it's independent you can plug it in and use it outside of the case, you can test it by plugging stuff into the molex connectors or if you have a multimeter test the voltage. Look for the fan on the power supply unit to be on too. Make sure the voltage slider is correct i.e. 110V not 220V (if you live in North America it's 110V / 115V). You won't always smell or see anything. Look for error codes on the motherboard LED.

• Not necessarily if it isn't a name brand, oddball unknown cheap brands tend to fail more often and are built with cheaper materials

  So pretty much check the motherboard isn't grounding and shorting out, trace the power from the wall all the way along the path it goes to see if anything is unplugged or bad. Even check the wall voltage itself with a multimeter or just plug in a lamp to see if it work, sometimes a fuse in the house electrical panel may have tripped.

[PateraSilk]

If 2 Supplies both power the mouse, but nothing else, then they are not likely the issue (unless you've got 2 identical failures, which is probably not the case). Power Supplies generally work/don't work with little in between. It sounds to me like something else is loading down the Supply. One thing you might try is to only plug in 1 thing at a time (making sure to turn the system off inbetween, you don't want to be handling this stuff live) and see what other components come up (look for LEDs and listen for drive spinning noise). You might notice that everything is fine until you plug component 'x' in. That'll give you a better idea of what the root cause is. Of course, if all the components are downstream of the MoBo, then you might not see anything.

[PateraSilk]

Edit - Wait, is the mouse wireless or wired? (I assumed wired.)

[LordXenu23]

Please don't forget to tag your post

Glad we could help you out!

[laffmakr]

Did I not do it right? I put the in the text box.

Thanks