Antec TruePower 430 toast? or another problem?

lemonlime

I opened my PC up last night to re-route some power cables (wiring was a little cluttered) and clean out the dust bunnies, only to find that my PC is now exhibiting some really odd behaviour.

At first, I thought one of my raptor's had died. I heard a constant spin up and clunk from one of the drives. Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was not just the one drive, but both. I did not change any of the wiring, nor did I install/remove anything. The only thing I saw that was out of the ordinary was that my +5V rail was registering a low 4.2 to 4.4 volts. All the other rails were ~99% bang on. The machine did seem to boot up finally, but was unstable, and the hard drives seemed to continue spinning up and shutting down. I did not want to risk any damage, so I shut the machine back down. I tried disconnecting everything but my radeon 9800 pro and the mainboard, but the 5V rail was still low. I need to pull out my multimeter tonight and check if that is correct. I had a cheapo-300W ATX supply that I hooked up briefly to see if the problem persisted. The drives behaved normally, however the 5V rail still registered 4.8V (since it is a cheap PSU, it would not surprise me if that is normal). Can anyone think of anything else before I go out and pick up a new supply?. Antec has a 3 year warrantee, but I think I've lost my receipt. Has anyone had luck dealing with Antec before?

Here is my specs:

Athlon XP 3000+ @11x200
512MB PC3200
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Ati Radeon 9800 Pro
2x36GB WD Raptor Drives
2xOptical Drives
1xFloppy
Antec True Power 430 (Almost 2 years old now).

Best Regards,
Mike

TheBaron

at that age it wouldn't surprise me. im told the 600w compusa supplies are excellent, if you need to get something locally

muddocktor

I recently (2-3 months ago) RMA'd an Antec psu I had that blew out spectacularly and it was a bit of a pain to go through Antec's RMA procedure, but they did replace the psu, which was 2 1/2 years old. I had to get in touch for the RMA from Antec, which actually wants you to fax an RMA request to them. I emailed the damn request to rma@antec.com instead and it was a real PITA dealing with it, since I don't own a fax and wasn't going to hunt to find one either. I did have to have an invoice showing the date of my purchase, which I had gotten from Newegg. If you bought your psu from Newegg, then they still have the invoice of your purchase in their database so that you can print it out for your RMA.

Here's 2 links for RMA'ing your psu with Antec. The first one is to Antec's contact page. This second one is to the RMA policy and procedure page with Antec. All told, it took about a month for me to get my replacement psu from them, which was brand new and not a refurb, BTW.

If you don't have the Invoice for the psu and didn't buy it from Newegg (where you could look through your past purchases and print up the invoice for it), then I think you will be SOL on getting it replaced though.

madmat

You could always go to the local computer store, slip the guy a $10 spot and get a "copy" of your reciept...

floppybootstomp

If you re-routed cables, check that all the Molex connectors have tight fitting pins, sometimes they are pushed out of the plug a little and become loose. That could maybe cause your problem.

I must admit though, the fact that the cheapie PSU worked OK would point to the Antec being faulty.

Antec are good with RMA's, if you don't have your receipt, maybe you could get in touch with them anyway, often the serial number is a good indication of when it was manufactured. Maybe if you can let them know the aprox. date of purchase and who you bought it from, that would help.

lemonlime

Well, I pulled out my trusty voltmeter and took some measurements, looks like the bios was not fibbing..

I got a reading of about 4.39V on the 5V rail. 12V came it at 12.01V. So Looks like it's toast.

I pulled an Enermax 300W supply out of another PC in my house, and everything is working great with that psu. Its a lower end model, but at least 5V comes in at 4.97V. Strange, seems like most lower end power supplies I test always have higher 12V rails. This one comes in at 12.6V. Another no-name brand supply I had was about 12.5.

Are your internal components less sensitive to the deviations of the 12V ?

Thanks for the information on Antec's RMA process. I will probably try to contact them later this week. Unfortunatly I do not have an invoice, I hope they will be understanding. Luckily I can use this enermax for the short-term. As you mentioned, I hope I will also get a replacement psu, and not a refurb

Hopefully things go more smoothly, I've got some new ram in the mail, and a 9800 pro, last thing I want is to have to buy a new psu. I hate unexpected repairs. :banghead:

Thanks for the help.

MediaMan

LemonLime

I've had that happen before on my system and it was not the rails. It was the MOLEX connectors that were not making proper electrical contact with the HDD.

The hard drives would intermittently click or not boot up the system Sometimes the desktop would just freeze. Then it would work fine for a period of a week or so.

It traced it down to the connection to the hard drive itself. Wiggling the molex connector into JUST the right place reproduced the problem. Like a lamp plug that just isn't in the socket correctly...the light flickers.

You have a couple of leads on that PSU. Switch leads routing the other lead to your drives then route the lead that previously powered your HDD to power your optical drives.

See if that confirms my theory by your HDDs now working properly. 4.39 v is low but not too much in the danger zone when not OCing. If it doesn't solve it...oh well...nice to get a shiny new PSU anyway.

floppybootstomp

That's two of us who've mentioned the molex connectors so it's maybe worth checking out.

Wiggling a 4 pin power connector in the back of a hard drive tp establish contact usually, but not always, indicates a dry solder joint where the connector socket is soldered into the HDD PCB. Unlikely on a Raptor drive, I would have thoght.

MediaMan

Ooops Sorry FBS.

In my haste to post a response I didn't see that you had already touched upon the MOLEX concern.

"wiggly molex" copyright 2004 FBS.

lemonlime

Thanks for the feedback. I looked very closely at all of the molex connections. Everything was fine. Connections were secure. I even tried using the SATA power connectors on the raptors, incase of a connection problem on the drives, but the same problem persisted.

The only odd thing that occured was an unexplained system crash before I opened the system up. Wonder if its related. I keep my MBM dashboard open when folding, and my rails are always rock solid. 5V is usually almost bang on, along with 12 and 3.3, it very rarely deviates by more than 0.05V. So, when I see 4.2V, it is certianly a sign of a bigger problem I'm sure

Going to try to RMA the psu. I'll use the enermax in the mean time, cant really afford another psu right now, so its worthwhile for me to wait for a replacement.

Thanks for the help everyone.

floppybootstomp

MediaMan wrote:

Ooops Sorry FBS.

In my haste to post a response I didn't see that you had already touched upon the MOLEX concern.

"wiggly molex" copyright 2004 FBS.

Aw, er, um.... shucks, I didn't mean it that way.... :o

/me is blushing now...

lemonlime: good luck with the RMA

lemonlime

Finally got my RMA replacement PSU.. If you look at the date of my original post, you can see that this problem started happening in early september. I didn't RMA it right away as I was pretty busy, but it literally took over a month to get my replacement. I certainly was not impressed with Antec's speed. As muddocktor mentioned above, their RMA process IS a pain. I had to fax everything to them, as they would not accept anything else.

The replacement PSU I got back appears to be refurbished, as it came in a plain cardboard box, with a lovely dent in the top of it . One nice plus is that it appears to be a newer revision PSU, with SATA connectors, as well as an external molex (really weird, right next to the power connector). Some other small differences (black molex connectors instead of white, and an embossed Antec logo on the top of the PSU). Rails are rock-frikin-solid, very impressed.. check out the screenie..

Gonna overclock it back to 230x9.5 (or maybe a little higher) now that I have a decent PSU once again.

Edit: Just tried 10x230, no go Need to get my WC setup. 63 degrees at load

paroxym

Lets see those rails under 100% load big shot haha
But yea, fine looking voltages there. Lets get that chip watercooled and pushed to its limits already.