PC totally dead - Advice please?

Namsnik · 25 Dec 2015 at 14:35

My son's pc has been working fine, including earlier this am. However he came back to it and it was off. We cannot get it to show any sign of life. Swapped out power cable (and checked it works). Shorted out the Terminals on Front panel header - no sign of life at all.

So, what should we do next? I am suspecting power supply (XFX XPS-650W-3XS). MotherBoard is http://download.gigabyte.ru/manual/mb_manual_ga-z97p-d3_e.pdf

StudentDavid · 25 Dec 2015 at 14:43

Any lights on the motherboard?

FloppyPoppy · 25 Dec 2015 at 14:47

Do you have a spare psu knocking about that you could test it with?

Namsnik · 25 Dec 2015 at 14:55

No lights, absolutely no sign of life. I guess I could take power supply out of my desktop. Only ome lying around is probably not up to the job for his spec - Unless it is worth trying with his graphics card not powered - just to see if we get an ettempt to post.

Namsnik · 25 Dec 2015 at 15:20

xmas meal now, but will get back to this when I can. I do have multimeter if that will help at all?

Namsnik · 26 Dec 2015 at 11:01

So Christmas being Christmas we didn't move on until this morning. We tried the paperclick test http://support.antec.com/support/so...19-is-my-power-supply-dead-the-paperclip-test (with a fan connected to ensure that there was a load) and the power supply and fan worked.
Was going to find multimeter but then decided to just reconnect everything and see if it worked.... it did!
So whilst that is good news in a way it is also a bit worrying. We seem to have an intermittent/occasional fault.

Son tells me that a few weeks ago he may have had the same fault. The pc powered off and wouldn't restart even switching mains connectors. Eventually it started working again but he never worked out what the cause was.

So I am thinking that maybe there is some internal overload protection kicking in and there is an underlying fault somewhere.
Each time it happened it was connected to the same Belkin anti-surge extension lead and it was not being used (so R9-280x won't have been drawing much power). Any ideas please?