Dying power supply?

Symptoms as they progressed last night:

System froze, requiring a hard reboot.

On reboot, screen stayed black, with no error beep codes and no sounds, although lights on optical drives and the hard drive activity light looked normal for a normal boot-up.

Swapped an older video card in; no lights. Tried an old monitor, still no lights.

Eventually rebooting would only keep the system on for about 10 seconds, then it would shut down on its own. A few times, it would start, run a few seconds, make a mechanical "click" like a physical relay, lights on mobo would flicker off, then back on, over and over, and the power button wouldn't shut it off.

Mobo is an ASUS nForce 2 board, AMD XP3000+, power supply Antec True-Power 425watt, all about 1.5 yrs old. I think power supply, but could also be mobo or cpu I guess.

Any opinions?I think it's the PSU.

 

Me the thing i do for checking the power supply is i unplugg some stuff
and try again left items you less power is required from your power supply
so you can if you have 2 harddisk unplug one and maybe remove your sound card and i am pretty you have a power supply issue you can even unplug
all harddsik your booting from a win98SE disquette if the computer stay open for a long time you knows is your power supply and the best is to have a voltmeter for checking the 5 volt and 12 volt.....

Hope this help....

 

I unplugged secondary hard drive and optical drives, didn't help. And got worse as the night went on.

 

G.T.,

I tend to agree with your original diagnosis! Did you take the side cover off the computer and make sure that the fans were running on the CPU heatsink as well as the video card, if so equipped?

 

Yes. All fans were spinning, although the amount of air blowing out of the power supply was suspiciously low.

 

If that is the case, then I agree that the power supply should be replaced.

 

Power supply did die, and during the meltdown took the motherboard with it. Good excuse to upgrade...