{"id":8442,"date":"2016-07-21T00:01:46","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T07:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8442"},"modified":"2016-07-16T11:36:07","modified_gmt":"2016-07-16T18:36:07","slug":"replacing-a-power-supply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8442","title":{"rendered":"Replacing a Power Supply"},"content":{"rendered":"

After two days, a new 500W power supply was delivered to my abode. My son and I took no time to install the beast into his PC. And right away we noticed that the new power supply featured a larger fan. It looked more efficient. If heat was causing his PC to restart, then the new power supply might help.
\n
\nTo replace the power supply, you first disconnect the power (duh) and open the PC’s case. Figure 1 illustrates this important step.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. Safety first! Disconnect the power.<\/p><\/div>\n

The power supply is the most-connected thing inside the PC; it has more cables than the motherboard. To remove it, you must disconnect all the power cables, then unscrew the power supply. Like everything in a PC, it’s modular, so after the four screws on the rear of the case are removed, you pop-out the old unit and plug in the new one.<\/p>\n

Figure 2 illustrates the mess of cables. Each one must be disconnected and you have to remember where they go. The locations are the disk drives, the motherboard, and on my son’s PC, the video adapter.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 2. The mess of power cables inside a PC console.<\/p><\/div>\n

Qe removed all the cables and popped out the old, 350W power supply. Then I inserted the new 500W power supply and reconnected almost all the cables.<\/p>\n

Yes, I forgot a cable. It happened to be to the PC’s primary hard drive. That was an obvious error because the system didn’t start. So we powered-off everything and reconnected that cable.<\/p>\n

The system ran fine for a while. Then we smelled ozone.<\/p>\n

I had my son turn off the PC. It was blisteringly hot.<\/p>\n

At first I blamed the power supply. It could be defective, so I removed it and replaced the original, 350W power supply. The ozone smell didn’t return, but still his PC kept resetting.<\/p>\n

I took the 500W power supply and ran it independently. You can do so by shorting two of the motherboard wires (the green one and any black one), which is a trick a grizzled PC hardware veteran taught me. I ran the 500W power supply for a few hours and it never got hot or smelled like ozone. That left one, final culprit for my son’s PC crashes: the video card.<\/p>\n

My son installed a temperature monitor and kept track of how hot the PC and the GPU (graphics processor) got while he ran a game. It was amazing: The GPU ran a fever of 98° C, near the boiling point of water. The monitor software also showed that his graphics card was maxed out on memory.<\/p>\n

It turns out the graphics card has only 1GB of RAM. To supplement, it borrowed memory from the motherboard and all that swapping for a high-end graphics card was heating up the system to the n<\/em>th degree. My guess is that the graphics card has a host of pregnant capacitors as well. That’s apparently what causing the system to overheat.<\/p>\n

We ordered a new graphics card and it should arrive by the next blog post. I’ll update you as to whether that replacement solved the restart problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Out with the old, in with the new, and then back again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,17],"class_list":["post-8442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc","tag-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8442"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8458,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8442\/revisions\/8458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}