My system: ECS K7S5A mobo, 1 Gig Athlon TBird, 512 Megs DDR Ram, Geforce2 GTS 32 Megs AGP videocard, SB Live! Gamer Soundcard, DVDRom, 40 Gig HDD, 9.1 Gig SCSI HDD, Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI Adapter, Internal IOMEGA 100 Meg ZIP Drive, APC Power Surge Protector, Windows 2000 Pro (SP4). Power Supply: L&C Technology Inc., Model: LC-300ATX, Output: 300W, +3.3V 14A, +5V 25A, +12V 10A.
The system is usually on for days on end running peer-to-peer clients such as Kazaa or eMule.
Some time back my PSU fan dies which created a "burnt sock" smell throughout the room and caused my system to automatically turn off (about 2 minutes after a cold boot). I managed to splice in a new fan and had my system up and running for months. Yesterday my system was running fine having been on for 3 days straight when it suddenly turned off. The room already had a "burnt rice" smell but I never figured it to be from my system. On closer inspection within my chasis there was a smokey rancid smell. The system was unable to turn on! I decided to plug in my brothers 250W P4 PSU into my system. My PC turned on but it wasnt able to display the intial BIOS startup screen. Nothing clicked in. I also noticed a smell coming from the system (perhaps even smoke?) but the smell could have been from the previous day's PSU dying and having its stench drift into and set onto my mobo area and the possible smoke I saw could have been dust. With my brothers 250W Pentium 4 PSU hooked to my system i also noticed the CPU Fan slow down. I also heard some clicks and maybe crackles but didnt pursue it.
At the moment I suspect my original system's PSU has died and I require a better performing new one. There is some concern that my motherboard and/or CPU could be toast but i cant say. Even though i tried attaching my brother's P4 PSU to my system (one extra power cable couldnt hook to my Athlon mobo as it does to his P4 mobo) it was unable to run (it powers up but no initial bios is shown). Could this be because the PSU is incompatible with my mobo? His PSU is a Lite-On Electronics PS 6251-2h7. There is no mention of ATX.
There is no scorch marks anywhere on the motherboard or even in the original PSU. From what I've mentioned how does my motherboard, CPU, and attached peripherals fair? Did the failure just occur within the PSU or did it do some serious damage to my system?
