As sky-high prices from the AI-driven RAMpocalypse cascade through everything with a chip in it, the last thing anybody wants to do right now is to buy a replacement memory kit, graphics card, or even an entire new desktop or laptop. And with today’s lengthening upgrade cycles, many of us are already using older systems that could now be facing down several more years of service before a new build is economical.
No sweat, you might think. A PC is mostly built from solid-state components these days. Sure, a fan might start rattling every once in a while, but that’s a cheap fix. And if a closed-loop liquid CPU cooler starts gurgling because of low coolant levels, it’ll hardly break the bank to slap on a replacement.
Don’t forget about your power supply, though. The caps and other components inside slowly and invisibly wear out with time and use, and the quality of power that the unit delivers can degrade in turn. Since the PSU is connected to every part of a system, it presents a risk of downstream failures that other components don’t.
I write this cautionary tale because I’m living through the fallout of precisely this kind of failure. I built a high-end workstation for a friend eight years ago that included a Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, a fancy X399 motherboard, a Radeon RX Vega 56 GPU, and 32GB of DDR4 memory, all connected to a reputable 850W PSU with an 80 Plus Gold rating and a 10-year warranty.
That system has served its owner well during that time, but I recently got the call you dread most as a friendly neighborhood system builder: that the PSU had made a weird noise and the system is suddenly stone-cold dead. Yes, it had been connected to a surge protector and UPS; no, there hadn’t been any thunderstorms or weird weather beforehand. Just dead.
In situations like these, you immediately hope that the fix is the simplest one: a new PSU. I grabbed a spare off my shelf, extracted the dead one from the system, and plugged it all back in.
No such luck here. The motherboard was clearly not well. Its RGB LED lighting only slowly came on when connected to power, and it made an unhealthy electronic ticking sound that I’ve never heard a PC make in all my years of building. Everything just blinked off the moment I pressed the power button.
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Cue hours of testing and troubleshooting to determine whether the RAM, CPU, and graphics card were all unharmed, or whether they too had been zapped by whatever had caused the PSU to give up the ghost. All together, that old power supply caused weeks of downtime and cost hundreds of dollars in new parts between troubleshooting and repairs.
Even if your PSU comes with a 10-year (or longer) manufacturer warranty like this one did, that protection usually only extends to the unit itself, not any of the components connected to it. You might be able to get a new unit from the OEM if a failure does occur, but that’s cold comfort if you’re suddenly facing hundreds or thousands of dollars in replacement parts.
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