Yesterday when I woke up, my computer was shut off. I usually keep my computer on most of the time. *sigh* made me so angry at the time.
Because I've also had problems with my Neato XV Signature Pro robotic vacuum cleaner, that I have now left in for repair.
Felt like EVERYTHING was failing and breaking at the same time, even if it was only two things.
I just had a hunch that It must be a broken power supply.
I just bought a new power supply and my computer works fine now. And I'm not really interested in repairing the old one.
I might scavenge some parts from it if they work. Because I have been thinking of building my own switched power supply as a project.
But I have some questions in the end of this post about why it might have broken like this.
I was hoping that I got a fun thing to troubleshoot and look around, measuring signals and things like that.
I glanced over all the capacitors, they looked fine. No leaking or swollen caps.
I've heard the NTC Thermistor is a thing that can break and cause problems? I have not really checked if it is OK yet.
The fuse is OK, strangely enough.
And then the error was pretty boring from a troubleshooting perspective, it was quite easy to spot.
A black area on the inside of the power supply chassis, close to that I found this completely blown IC
Sorry for the very large picture.
And I also found this little bit of IC falling out.
Guessing from this picture, it is a TNY278 "Off-Line switcher"
Data-sheet:
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/139812/POWERINT/TNY278PN.htmlI wonder what could have caused this to happen?The power supply that I had was at 600W. I wonder if it might have been to weak to power my computer.
I do have a pretty good graphics card my my computer. An Asus GeForce GTX 780 Ti (It was new in 2013 I think).
Three harddrives, and 5 Fans. A pretty old sound-card, Creative Audigy with one of those front panels with lots of outputs and inputs, MIDI and optical etc.
A Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31240 @ 3.30GHz CPU, that runs pretty cool
And ECC memory.
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0: +38.0°C (high = +74.0°C, crit = +94.0°C)
Core 0: +33.0°C (high = +74.0°C, crit = +94.0°C)
Core 1: +34.0°C (high = +74.0°C, crit = +94.0°C)
Core 2: +37.0°C (high = +74.0°C, crit = +94.0°C)
Core 3: +39.0°C (high = +74.0°C, crit = +94.0°C)
I bought a new power supply now at 850W. A little bit more expensive, from EVGA, fancy luxury stuff, lol.
Hopefully of better quality, and enough to power my computer.
But I wonder, what does the "off-line switcher" really do?
What functionality does it have?
What could have caused this to just blow up like this? It must have happened over night. So I never noticed it.
The only thing that looks broken is this blown IC from what I can see.