Is my HX520W from 2007 Dying?

[dedgecko]

Hi All,

 

I powered down my PC Wednesday evening for the first time in a long time. Sounded like 2 of the 3 ******** P180B case fans were suddenly dying.

 

I attempted to fire up my rig yesterday evening, but alas the system does not POST. Prior installing a PC speaker (since the ******** case doesn't have one), I swapped my RAM, tried to POST with one or none in (again switched em in case one suddenly went bad). Still nothing. I reseated my 8800GT - check all power connections - still nothing.

 

Brings us to today. I pulled a PC speaker out of an older system and attached it to the mobo - Asus P5N-E SLI. It takes about 20 seconds prior to any beeps, but they are there. 1 long, 3 short, a 3 second pause, and a final short beep. That's the generic tone structure for issues with the video card. At this time I don't have another PCI-E system to drop my 8800GT into, but I'm wondering if it's possible that the video card isn't getting enough power for it to function properly.

 

Since installing the PC speaker - I pulled out the HX520W and checked to see if it would power an older P4 2.53 system from pre2007 - which appeared to POST just fine. Stumped, I brought the PSU back to my main rig, and tried the "paper-clip" test. Now that I'm actually watching the Fan spin in the PSU, I've noticed it's moving quite slow. It's moving slower than the stock CPU HSF, and two of the three ******** 120mm Case fans.

 

I'm going to take this sytem over to a friend's house tomorrow to try swapping out vid cards / PSU's to see if I can determine the problem - but any suggestions?

[dedgecko]

Swapped in a corsair TX 650w and still got the same results. Making my EVGA 8800GT truly dead.

 

I'm going to get this thing RMA'd off to them, however, is there anything that I can do to make sure that my old HX520w was not responsible for killing the video card? I swapped in a cheap PCI-E vid card in place of the 8800 and the system got past POST. However, this card does not require an external 6-pin or 8-pin from the PSU, so I want to ensure that if I get a proper replacement video card (either a new 8800GT replaced by EVGA, or one of the newer ATI cards), it doesn't get toasted by my existing PSU.

 

Thank you for your time.

[RAM GUY]

If the PSU was the cause of the damage to the video card you would have likely seen other damage as well. If you have any problems at all with the second graphics card let us know, but there really isn't a way to be 100% sure that the PSU did or did not cause the damage to the video card. The PSU does have fail safes built in to prevent damage to the rest of the system, so it would be unlikely that the PSU would kill the graphics card.

[dedgecko]

Thanks for the response. I'm going to try testing the power coming out of my 520W just in case using a volt meter. It all seems odd what with the lack of a blown capacitor / foul smelling odor to be found anywhere in the case.

 

I've got a GTS 250 due in tomorrow - I'll give that a whirl before returning the spare PSU.