Yep, I had an Ultra X-connect power supply pop and kill a motherboard and graphics card. (MSI socket 754 with a 6800XT)

I've also had ESD kill a XFX 5950 Ultra back in the day when I wasn't careful with handling cards. I walked across my carpet with it to dust it out, came back and it never worked again. I also killed a motherboard with ESD (Jetway AM2 ITX board) when I installed a stainless steel vandal switch on the front of a plastic PC case -- I zapped the power button with my finger which fed ESD into the motherboard and flat out killed it. Never was able to get it to power on ever again. (it also killed the vandal switch power LED, and I couldn't even get it to light up on the test bench)

I've only had one PSU failure, a filter cap started smoking in a 350 W Codegen so I unplugged it immediately. Nothing else was damaged and the PSU worked fine after I replaced smokey. It gave me quite a scare though.

vetz wrote on 2021-03-16, 11:33:

So the general consensus is that you should replace your old PSU's whenever possible. My question is, how many people have actually had hardware ruined due to an old failing PSU? I haven't read many first hand stories about this, and I haven't experienced it myself. It is kind of the same story with static electricity protection when handling hardware.

I have replaced the PSU's in ATX systems were a newer one didn't matter in terms of aesthetics, but with my older builds, finding a newer PSU that looks the part is very hard, especially where I live (importing a Seasonic is just too expensive as they are not sold locally). Refurbishing/recapping the PSU, how would you rate that compare to replacing it?

Anything remotely modern shouldn't be harmed by static electricity. I've frequently been shocked by my stuff with no issues. The amount of ESD protection is pretty impressive on stuff! Much more so than a wristband provides. But I have had things broken by old PSU's with dead roaches and stuff in them. Which is why I don't use old PSU's without taking them apart and cleaning/examining them anymore. I try to repair things and replace bad caps when possible. I don't like to be wasteful. But a lot of the time it's way easier and more reliable to rig a newish psu to work on your older hardware. In terms of having a psu that looks the part it should be really easy to just swap the housing. Recapping PSU's is super simple you should just be very careful to completely discharge it. Either buy or make you a dedicated screwdriver for discharging. You should rubberize most of it besides the very tip which should be a very dull point not a phillips/flathead. A hex driver works well for this. You can spray it with flex seal or gorilla spray to rubberize the rest of it. All of that said, my practices are probably pretty sloppy. I'm reasonably capable and hardware repair but I don't know nearly as much as others on here. Maybe someone else has better advice on best practices!

I've had an old enermax PSU go up in flames, the hardware survived though as far as I can remember ^^

you can always just reuse an old PSUs shell and cable harness and put a new PSU inside of it if it's for aesthetics.

MoG91 wrote on 2021-03-16, 12:58:

Anything remotely modern shouldn't be harmed by static electricity. I've frequently been shocked by my stuff with no issues. The amount of ESD protection is pretty impressive on stuff! Much more so than a wristband provides.

False. ESD shunt protection in modern hardware only provides 1kv-2kv protection, and is meant to be used as secondary protection while being used in conjunction with a wrist strap and ESD safe handling practices. Modern hardware is also easier harmed by ESD since it is manufactured on a much smaller nanometer scale -- junctions in IC's are damaged or blown at lower voltages and currents. ESD is usually a latent killer of components, and is only realized after 'x' power cycles or 'y' number of operating hours.

I had a few LC Green 550W bang up and didn't break anything else. Then I bought Antec PSU - it still works fine 15 years later...

Never. Power supply failure causing downstream component failure is exceedingly rare. It's an exploded myth

Had an old psu fail on a computer, blew it's own caps, and killed the graphics card, though the rest of the computer managed to survive. P4 system, 512M ATI card...

Back in college, so I think around 2003, I had an old Antec 300W blow out in my old LAN Party Pentium 2/3 (I don't remember), Geforce 2 GTS system that went off to school with me. It did... weird things. One of the hard drives that must have gotten a shock could only correctly read data. I was probably torrenting anime or something at the time. All the data that wrote to it after the PSU blow was corrupted. The network adapter built into the motherboard died. And the fan on the GPU quit working. I replaced the PSU, borrowed a network adapter, and limped through the last month or two of the school year. Laptops were required for students, so I ended up doing most of my work on that, despite preferring desktops generally.

This is all approaching 20 years ago, so take my recollection with a grain of salt.

Had a PSU explode on a Socket 478 Pentium 4 PC. The UPS it was attached to also popped, banged & smoked - so not sure if the PSU killed the UPS or the UPS killed the PSU. Nothing else connected to the UPS was harmed. Either way, it damaged the Hard Drive in such a way that the drive could no longer be detected by the BIOS in most computers. But the drive did still work when connected to a PCI IDE RAID card, where it still functions to this day in 1 of my Slot 1 Pentium III PCs!

The PSU was not only old, it was a cheap crappy PSU that I'd been running 24/7 in a PC set up as a Server, that also did some light gaming. The PSU exploded after a heavy session of Flatout Ultimate Carnage, it certainly lived up to the name! 🤣

Also had an HDD fail after a PSU failure. The drive had a burnt voltage regulator and wouldn't start even after I replaced the IC.

wiretap wrote on 2021-03-16, 13:14:

MoG91 wrote on 2021-03-16, 12:58:

Anything remotely modern shouldn't be harmed by static electricity. I've frequently been shocked by my stuff with no issues. The amount of ESD protection is pretty impressive on stuff! Much more so than a wristband provides.

False. ESD shunt protection in modern hardware only provides 1kv-2kv protection, and is meant to be used as secondary protection while being used in conjunction with a wrist strap and ESD safe handling practices. Modern hardware is also easier harmed by ESD since it is manufactured on a much smaller nanometer scale -- junctions in IC's are damaged or blown at lower voltages and currents. ESD is usually a latent killer of components, and is only realized after 'x' power cycles or 'y' number of operating hours.

I'd inclined to agree that modern hardware have better protection. Just watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXkgbmr3dRA

Good to see first hand accounts of this. Seems you can be both lucky and unlucky in a situation where the PSU fails. Seems bad caps is the most common failure? Thus recapping your PSU is a safe alternative?

Yes, we've all seen the linus video which was not even scientific, and rather arbitrary with no control methods. 99% of the time they are just zapping straight to ground. It all depends which path the electricity takes, where you touch it, how you hold it, and what your environment is like. There is no silver bullet explaining it all in one sentence or one experiement randomly trying to zap hardware. I'll stick by my statements, based on ESDA literature, and working in an industry where I continually send out circuit boards for electron microsope / x-ray failure analysis.

wiretap wrote on 2021-03-16, 15:24:

Yes, we've all seen the linus video which was not even scientific, and rather arbitrary with no control methods. It all depends which path the electricity takes, where you touch it, how you hold it, and what your environment is like. There is no silver bullet explaining it all in one sentence or one experiement randomly trying to zap hardware. I'll stick by my statements, based on ESDA literature, and working in an industry where I continually send out circuit boards for electron microsope / x-ray failure analysis.

True, that video didn't have any control, but it was hillarious to watch anyway 😁 Still, I think it shattered some myths around, I never thought hardware could at all survive what they put it through, but as you say, if you're unlucky it will die.

It's funny, but just perpetuates myths and gets dozens more people to say "SEEEEEE LOOK AT THIS, ESD IS A LIE". In reality, if that was the case, we wouldn't need to spend billions of dollars per year on ESD controls at factories, and over $2M/yr at my work because of dumb technicans. I'm currently processing the paperwork for a GE NUMAC unit that a technican killed when he felt a zap to the EPROM that he was supposed to change and didn't wear his wrist strap. A nice $800k mistake. (yes, that's the cost of the EPROM)

Can't say that I've seen damaged hardware due to "old PSUs", but having worked in a computer service center for many years in the past, I've seen A TON of damaged hardware caused by low quality PSUs (even if those PSUs were relatively new at the time).
So, if I were to extrapolate, nowadays, low quality 20+ year old PSUs (with dead or soon-to-be-dead caps) are clearly a ticking time bomb.

Edit: I completely agree with you, wiretap. The fact that many people think that ESD is some sort of urban legend is hilarious to me. But... to each their own, I guess...

I have been permanently chained to an old radiator with iron shackles in a damp basement which is why I'm not very concerned with ESD.
I am pretty happy about that residual-current device though.

Sounds like we have two different discussions here.

ESD is unprovable as failure cause without access to the kind of electron microscope wiretap has access to, but I've seen the pictures of ESD at that level and they are clear enough. I've also seen concrete examples of differences in return rates between PC shops that did an ones that did not implement good ESD practices. ESD is real and causes failures, lots of them - it just takes a long time for the failures to manifest themselves. Given we're talking about old crap and keeping it running over long periods, we should all care about ESD, even if we don't see stuff going up in smoke in front of our eyes.

But the original question was about precisely that: spectacular failure of PSUs causing things to die instantly.

I've seen a lot of hardware and seen a lot of it fail, but never actually had a clear-cut case of something dying due to bad PSU. The closest I came was a system I picked up off the street, with a motherboard with completely toasted ISA bus. Any card in any slot would short the system out - although it would actually start POSTing without ISA cards (and yes, I used my ATX2AT smart converter here, otherwise I would have blown the next PSU trying to discover this). The PSU was also blown - bad caps and a melted MOSFET. Either a short in the ISA bus killed the PSU, or the dying PSU caused the damage to the motherboard. Can't say. Both were bottom-scraping low-end (PC Chips M537DMA board and Q-Tec "300W" PSU), although I'm inclined to blame the PSU sooner than the board.
Apart from that what I have seen is that badly regulated power exacerbated other issues. During the capacitor plague, boards with dodgy caps connected to crap PSUs seemed to die a lot sooner than identical boards behind good ones. That said, the all die eventually. It's also interesting to note a lot of the experiences mentioned in earlier posts date to exactly the same plague era (1999-~2004), and that PSUs also contained bad ones.

I have however had several instances of PSU's exploding and/or literally going up in acrid smoke with no short or medium term damage to connected components. YMMV and usually you get lucky. However that also applies to playing Russian Roulette, so saying you do is NOT a recommendation to use subpar PSUs. I am however in the camp of using good quality period PSUs rather than exclusively using new ones, and I'd rather have a 20-year old known-good PSU than a new one of dubious provenance.

The only "common" cases that I know of power supplies killing PC hardware is due to some dodgy ATX units where the +5VSB line would fail and kill components that remain powered during standby (such as RAM and some other chips in the motherboard). That's why I'm always puzzled about the usual perception on this forum that AT units are "much more dangerous" or "ticking time bombs" even though they don't even have a standby line.

Rogue +5VSB is the #1 reason of PC hardware getting killed on PSU failure, and other than that I feel the emphasis should be put on "well built" vs "cheap garbage" rather than "new" vs "old". Any PSU can fail, but quality ones have the proper protections to avoid damage to other components, whether they are new or old.

I've heard the concern about AT power supplies being "time bombs" many times in Phil's Computer Lab videos, so given how popular those are I think it kind of propagates to forums like this one. The problem is that he never goes into any technical depth as to why they are inherently more unsafe than ATX other than "they're old".

Personally I also prefer using (somewhat) period accurate PSUs for several reasons:

• Cost (I'm not going to spend on a new Corsair 600W monster + AT/ATX adapter + SATA-Molex adapter(s) each time I want to build a 486 or a Pentium 1)
• Compatibility (enough amps in +5V/+3.3V for hungry Athlons and no cross-loading issues due to low 12V consumption of older builds)
• Looks (this is personal, but IMO black PSUs look like ass in old cases, also the big fan on the bottom can end up blocked by flat cable spaghetti in small cases)

Refurbishing old power supplies is a great skill to have in the retro world, and it's usually a very simple job to do: replace fan + replace caps.

Regarding ESD, it's very real, I think that fact cannot be argued. That said, I usually don't do anything to prevent it other than storing hardware in anti-static bags.