PC was randomly restarting at first, then it started happening more frequent then it started happening when the PC was booting, idling and gaming. Took it apart and started testing diodes, MOSFETs and circuit traces, been at this for a few days until i saw the problem.
A blown ceramic capacitor on one of the minor voltage daughterboard was causing the issue, i replaced it with a similar size cap and now the issue has stopped.
ATTENTION! DON’T THIS AT HOME!
20 Comments
You’re a brave one, OP
It’s not that it’s impossible to fix a psu, it’s just that it’s risky and most people don’t know the proper safety precautions to take. That’s why everyone recommends to never open psus.
Nevertheless, good job on fixing it!
jfc OP glad you’re still with us
For those around here who might not know:
DON’T FUCKING OPEN YOUR PSU TO TRY AND FIX IT
Some things are risky enough to not warrant fixing. Not to rain on your parade, but I would *never* fix a PSU. It is the single item in the whole mix that can burn your house down.
Cause I will not ever recommend or tell a random person to go poking around live capacitors, or be a part of the possible electrical fire said repairs can cause by bad repairs or soldering.
Its not like its impossible to do, but generally not worth doing vs warranties, time, discharging all the capacitors, and life expectancy of the rest of the capacitors on that remain.
*ATTENTION! DON’T THIS AT HOME!*
…If I do it in the neighbors yard it’s cool right?
Congrats on fixing it OP!
If there’s anything I’ve learned from my years on reddit… It’s don’t touch garage door springs and don’t touch capacitors.
Surprised no one has commented about how your title rhymes and it’s kinda catchy in my head. On topic, nice save OP! Now don’t do it again, lol
I have a feeling no less than a dozen people in this sub are going to suffer electrocution thinking they can roll those dice and not come up snake eyes like OP.
Yeah sure, risk electrocution and then even if you manage to fix it, it’s still a risk to your expensive PC, because you’re too cheap to just get a new one and too obstinate to bother trying an RMA.
Don’t DIY power supplies. Ever.
**ATTENTION** doing this can literally kill you.. OP, I salute your efforts but I would take the post down. Capacitators on an open case PSU can kill a person if they are not savvy.
You don’t actually want to wait for a PSU failure as it carries a big potential of frying your hardware, it’s one of those things you should change before it starts acting up.
We could say the same to you. Don’t do this at home.
Why would you do that with an evga psu under warranty?
Your insurance company will simply refer to this as “exhibit A”
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And congrats on the fix
Unless you are a electrician / electrical engineer and 100% know what you are doing and could build a PSU from scratch, I don’t see the harm. For your average PCMR user. Just get a new one, please.
Did you hear it when it blew? I had a cap blow on an 1800W evga psu that I had overloaded and I thought I was being shot at. I actually ducked when it happened
I’m not going to whine about not opening PSU’s. I’ve opened many to repair and modify. It isn’t an issue if you know the precautions to take.
But what I will say is that expect further problems with this PSU.
Ceramic capacitors should not suddenly explode. That failure method means they were exposed to some extreme volts/amps.
So something downstream probably is way out of spec and caused the capacitor to fail.
Have you checked all the rails are within spec?
If it was an electrolytic that failed, I’d think a simple replace would fix it. Since electrolytic sometimes just fail.
But I wouldn’t expect a ceramic to fail without their being another failure elsewhere that caused it to fail.
Why would you even bother on a PSU that’s still under warranty? Now you have a PSU of extremely questionable reliability that no longer has a warranty, because you modified it, when you could have had a brand new PSU instead.
What are you doing stepdaughter board!