In article , "ME"
wrote:

OK,
Need some info.
This is kind of off topic as it is in regards to the power supply but I
wanted to get a bit of feedback. I've been posting over the past two months
about the news system I was building using the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe. I've
had a couple of problems so on the info I found here Saturday night I booted
to a disk with memtest86 and set it to full test (with the promise
controller disabled) and let it run. After a little over an hour it popped
up a list of two errors (one at about 256 MB and one at about 550 mb) and
there was a couple of clicking type noise's in the case, I look over and saw
the cd-roms drive lights were blinking and then it completely shut off. I
went over, got down (it's in a InWin 500A case under the desk) and as I put
my hand on the power supply to lean the unit over I found the power supply
was very hot. I moved it out and set it on it's side and after looking it
over for any obvious signs of the problem I let it cool down and then tried
to restart it. It cam back on with corrupt video (like the old asci
characters, the blinking blocks.) but for only a second. I removed all the
accessory's (drive cables and power connectors) from t he board and put my
Dmanpdi in the PCI slot and attempted again to start it, this time it only
went on for a second or two but I could see the power led indicter's on the
dman card only two even started to come on. The -12 Volt led did nothing.
Over the past couple of day's, thanks to my trusty old CUSL2-C I've been
able to checkout most all the drives and the video card and found that my
DVD drive, one HDD and my video card aren't working right for different
reason's. I'm working on getting a P4 Power supply to test the mb, cpu, sata
drive and memory.

Component and problems

Creative Labs Dxr3 Decoder and dvd player....(haven't been able to test the
decoder card) the drive has read error's. I tried to use it to install XP on
a 30GB I'm using now and it kept failing. Maxtor 40 GB 54098H8....had 8Gb of
"unreadable gibberish' on it but after running maxblast on it now SMART disk
say's it's about to fail. The warranty expired in Nov 03. ATI Radeon 8500
LE works but in the property sheet of XP it say's it cant get the info from
the "CDS" so no info is available and there's a yellow mark on it. it also
wont take the ATI driver only the XP. I'm emailing ATI about that part. The
40 GB and the DVD drive were on the same controller and power line set of
connectors.

I believe the power supply died after only about 38 day's and the
company I got the power supply from say's they aren't responsible for the
rest, only the replacement of the power supply. They say there' sending me a
replacment one. I'm concerned that the new P4C800-E deluxe, P4 3.2 CPU, 1GB
Kingston 3200 memory and Maxtor 160 GB SATA hard drive may be damaged.
Thoughts? Opinions? Any case's I might be able to find online?
ME

If I can interpret the symptoms of the parts you've tested, as
being failures, then perhaps the dying PSU delivered some out of
spec voltages that have cooked some stuff. Of the things in
your list, I would say the 1GB of RAM and the P4 3.2 CPU are most
likely to still be good. This is because regulating circuitry on
the motherboard tends to feed them. The motherboard itself and
the disk drive connect straight to the PSU, so they could
potentially be damaged as well.

What is the brand and model number of the PSU ?

We'd like to know, so nobody else buys one.

What are the ratings printed on the side of the PSU.
There is usually a label with 12V@ xx amps etc printed on
it, and perhaps the PSU had too low a rating, or the PSU
had a poor balance between all of its output capabilities.
There are some 500W class PSU's for example, really cheap,
that have less than adequate +12V output. A high end P4
system can cook one of those PSUs quite easily.

Sorry for your loss,
Paul