r/pcmasterrace • u/Front_Cookie_1198 • 1d ago

Hardware PSU fails dramatically

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

36.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

140

u/Busy-Distribution-45 1d ago

Was going to say, last time I saw something like that was when I thought a power supply was auto-switching and plugged it into a customer’s machine. Turns out it was manual, and had been on 110 power as we are in the US (industrial machine was stepped up to 220).

63

u/Krell356 22h ago

What kind of trash PSU explodes into flame over that though? Every one ive ever seen blow from that just makes a loud pop and starts breathing the mysterious blue smoke of death.

4

u/falcrist2 6h ago

the mysterious blue smoke of death.

It's called "magic smoke", and there's a whole wikipedia page about it.

9

u/Busy-Distribution-45 22h ago

The flames were very short lived and it looked like it was the label or case that actually caught. When it happened to me, the caps (I assume it was them, anyway) exploded sequentially and sounded like a Chinese firecracker string going off, but louder, and there was like thick black smoke that smoked out the lab. As for if there were flames, well, it was inside the pc case, so there probably were, just we couldn’t see them.

6

u/TheRealFakeWannabe 18h ago

bro but what kind of trash PSU explodes into flames over getting plugged?

2

u/FoxyBastard 17h ago

Back in about 2001, I got handed a shitty comp with a switch on the back to switch between 220v and 110v.

Here in 220v-land in Europe.

I wrote the PC off as a write-off (from the 80s, probably).

I couldn't help but to hit that switch while it was running and see what happened.

A pop, and a puff of smoke.

Killed the machine.

1

u/the_harakiwi 5800X3D 64GB Noctua 5080 18h ago

When I did that to a PSU it made a loud

POP

and a bit of magic smoke but no fire. This was before auto switch PSUs.

1

u/NoConfusion9490 5h ago

Usually they just don't operate at the wrong voltage. Maybe they source unpredictable DC to the other components and do damage, but they should NEVER do this.

1

u/Busy-Distribution-45 2h ago

If you put a manual switched one on 220v when it is switched to 110, it does more than not work. The other way around, yes, it just doesn’t turn on, but double the voltage causes issues unless you get one they bothered to put fuses in

1

u/NoConfusion9490 33m ago

I've done that plenty of times and the built in protection circuit handled it fine. Just an LED blink code.