aaron880•1d agoProlific Poster

I used to think a bad power supply was always obvious

Had a gaming PC in the shop last week that would randomly reboot during light use, but ran fine under a stress test. I spent 3 hours swapping RAM, testing the motherboard, and checking temps before I finally plugged in a spare PSU. The old unit was putting out unstable 12v rails only under very specific, low loads. Anyone else run into a power supply that fails in a weird, sneaky way like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

lily_cooper1d ago

Yeah, I read a forum post once where a guy's PC would only crash when his hard drive spun up. Took him forever to trace it back to a bad voltage on the 5v rail. Those weird failure modes are the worst.

rayadams1d ago

Used to brush off those stories as made up forum tales until my own rig started freezing only during video exports. Took me weeks to find a tiny voltage dip on the 12v line when the GPU kicked in. Now I believe every single one of them. Cheap parts might fail more often, but the really weird faults just need the perfect wrong setup to show up.

morganmartinez1d ago

Unstable 12v rails under low loads" sounds like a ghost story for techs. Lily_cooper's hard drive story is the same spooky genre, but how often does this actually happen outside of forums? Most of the time a bad PSU just dies.

matthewmiller1d ago

Ever wonder if those weird power supply stories are more common now because parts are just built cheaper? Feels like you hear about it all the time.