The Power Supply Saga!

I decided to take some photos. :)

You can see my old Corsair 750W Modular power supply in the attached images. See if you can spot the problem in the very last image! :)

I only noticed it after I got into the car with my Mom. Lol!

I kind of wanted to take the whole system in today so that it would be somebody else's headache, "Here, fix it! Make it go!" :P

But I did work in IT for nearly 30 years, including system repair for desktops, laptops, servers, and even blade servers. So this morning I was like, "Stop being a lazy ass, dude. You have no idea how busy Best Buy is going to be, or how long you might have to wait for a repair. Just remove the Power Supply, buy a new one, and get the damn thing installed so that you are back up and running."

Which is precisely what I did, and I couldn't see the obvious damage until I had it completely removed. As I said, I spotted the problem pretty much as soon as I sat down in the car and the Power Supply Unit (PSU) was in my lap. So that confirmed for sure that the PSU had an issue. That made me feel a lot better about just buying a new one.

So I bought a brand new MSI MAG 1000w Modular Power Supply, which is a nice upgrade over my 750w. I mostly purchased that one because it was on sale and was basically the same price as a new 850w. They didn't have any 750s, so I had to go up to at least an 850 anyway. And if you are going to upgrade... well, it's kind of like boobs, "Go big or go home!" :D

Some of the cables on this new PSU are different from my old one, so I did waste nearly an hour trying to plug the wrong cable into the CPU Fan port on my motherboard. <slaps forehead> But a quick google revealed my simple error, I swapped it out for the correct cable, and the system is now up and running.

However, I will still be offline for most of the rest of today as I will be testing the system to make sure it's stable by running some benchmarks and stress tests. The stress tests will naturally include playing some video games like Space Marine 2 and Total War: Warhammer 3, as they tax my system more than rendering these days. The biggest test will be trying to do both at the same time: render and play a game.

I used to do that all of the time when I had two graphics cards, but stopped doing it when I went to a single, more powerful, card. But trying that for an hour or two would really stress my system and let me see what may or may not happen.

Also, my system seems to be running cooler with the bigger and newer PSU installed. A nice side effect that I also experienced when I switched to a single graphics card. There could be a bunch of reasons for that, but the why doesn't really matter. Cooler is better, and that's all that's important.

I hope you are all having a nice day!

Talk to you soon. :)