Power Problem Diagnosis

[Yoshi]

My PC has been acting up for the last several weeks and finally appears to have croaked. It started out by taking several minutes to turn on after I hit the power button. There was a fairly quiet but high pitched whine that was audible as well. Now, I can't get it to turn on at all with one power supply, and another one turns on withou even hitting the power button but never boots. In the second scenario, everything seems to turn on, but it goes nowhere.

Does anyone have a guess as to whether this is a motherboard issue, a double power supply issue, or something else? The motherboard is a 4 year-old ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. The power supplies are a 420W Chieftec and a 500W Antec, so we aren't dealing with shitty parts or anything.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide. I don't want to go buying shit to replace something that isn't broken a day after dropping the PS3 bomb.

[stormy]

I tend to think a power supply either works or it doesn't. I can't see how a bad power supply would make your computer boot slower since it's supplying the needed power or it's not. Sounds to me like your MB ate it, but it could be another part as well.

[Burky]

Can you describe the problem a little better?
When you say it was acting up, how?
When you say it doesn't boot, what stage does it get to before it gives up?

If it's having trouble with both power supplies, it suggests the problem lies elsewhere.
It's weird though that with one the computer turns on and while with the other it doesn't. Which brand works and doesn't?
Is Chieftec a good brand? I've not heard of it before...
Could you tell us what processor and ram you are using as well?

I've not heard of components taking longer to boot, etc due to being faulty, so I don't really know what to suggest.

I tend to think a power supply either works or it doesn't. I can't see how a bad power supply would make your computer boot slower since it's supplying the needed power or it's not. Sounds to me like your MB ate it, but it could be another part as well.

A power supply can cause a computer to be unstable, so it isn't always just a case of whether a power supply works or not.

[outRider]

Did you buy the second power source new? I have that exact same motherboard and had an Antec power supply, and it turned out to be the power supply. For over a year I couldn't shut the thing down without physically cutting the power, both network cards would spontaneously report unplugged cables, the video card would crap out, and eventually it just stopped booting--it would power up for 2 seconds and reset, over and over. With all those assorted problems I thought it was the motherboard, which is why I didn't do anything about it for over a year, but when it died I tried a new power source before trying to find a replacement A7N8X, and the machine works beautifully now.

I'd buy a new power supply and see if that fixes your problem, it's a lot less trouble than replacing a motherboard.

[Yoshi]

The Chieftec powers itself on but won't boot, while the Chieftec won't power on at all. The Chieftec was the original, and I upgraded to the higher wattage of the Antec roughly a year ago. The rest of the components have been together for years, so it's not a relationship problem. However, the CPU is an Athlon XP 2600+, and it has 1GB of Corsair DDR-333 RAM IIRC. The GPU is an ATI Radeon X700 Pro.

[Yoshi]

I decided to give a new power supply a chance, since I will need a new one when I build my new PC anyway. This is what I went with:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817182030

I'm really hoping this does the trick and that it is not the mobo.

[Yoshi]

The new power supply arrived today. I appear to now have two good power supplies, one bad power supply, and one bad motherboard. I guess my new PC build is going to be about two months ahead of schedule.