Joe lee

best regards
email: szbyme@gmail.com

- Anyway; moving on: The absence of a -5V supply is becoming quite commonplace recently on a number of boards. – Not having a -5V supply probably won’t be any type of cause for concern in 9 out of 10 cases.

With regard to the location of the connections for your “LED switch and PW switch” I’m afraid I can only advise you to check your motherboard’s manufacturer’s documentation.

I am new at building a PC, have changed parts before, video, memory and ect.

I just bought a Ultra Power supply tester, I plugged in my motherboard connector into it all the light were on except the -5 volt light does this mean i have a bad power supply???

Also, having a problem finding exact location for the LED switch and PW switch on my mother board. I have a gateway computer with ht2000 motherboard made by ECS model #mcp61am. Can you help with this connection.

Thanks for you help!

ray bloom

Once again I agree that a decent-quality PSU is always a good thing: However, if the PSU used is a bad-quality PSU then it’s most-likely that it won’t be able to continuously supply the wattage that it’s rated at.

While in numerous cases it has been known for a cheapo PSU to fail when its rated wattage is continuously demended from it, and in rare cases for it actually to blow up, it’ll most likely just not be up to the job expected of it and therefore will fail to provide the required wattage, causing a blue-screen-of-death or something similar.

Whilst this may strain other components, it is unlikely in itself to cause damage. What will cause damage is when the poor-quality PSU finally ‘decides’ that it can’t handle any more strain of being asked to continuously supply more wattage than it is actually capable of doing, and internal components fail causing voltage-spikes on the supply-rails, which in turn damage the sensitive MOSFET-based integrated circuits (chips).

Furthermore you state: -

“Also, wattage really doesn’t matter. 520W with enough amperage on the right rails is enough for everyone.”

…So you would say. then, that a person running a quad-core 45nm-fabricated processor, with 5 hard-drives in a RAID configuration, using quad-SLI graphics and playing Call of Duty at maximum screen resolution with a high-frame-rate only needs a 520-watt PSU? Maybe they’d be playing for a whole minute if they were extremely lucky.

What do you mean about “520W with anough amperage”? – At 520 watts the amperage is dependant upon the voltage: -

At 1.5 volts the amperage is 520W/1.5V = 346.667 amps.

At 5 volts the amperage is 520W/5V = 104 amps.

At 12 volts the amperage is 520W/12V = 43.334 amps.

According to Ohm’s Law those amperages are fixed values at those preset voltages at a wattage of 520 watts. – However, if the PSU were a cheap and nasty model that was rated at 520W peak-output, then the 520-watt output could not be maintained continuously, and the wattage would drop off, resulting in a proportional-reduction of the current (Amperage) supplied to the circuitry, which would cause some part to function inefficiently and disrupt the program, causing possibly a BSOD or some other type of failure.

I’ve not been back to this thread for a while as I assumed that nothjing else was going on here: It’s good to see that there’s life in it yet.

While I agree that making sure that the PSU used in any computer you build is a good and reliable quality product is a necessity; especially if you’re building for someone else, the quality of the PSU is not linked in any way to short-circuits on the (mother)board: It’s just as likely to have a short-circuit on a motherboard if you’re using a top-quality $1000 PSU as it is to have a short-circuit on it if you’re using a $10 chinese-made no-name PSU. A short-circuit is a short circuit: It’s where two or more different, usually opposing polarity, currents meet, due to either something separating them coming adrift so that the two meet, causing heat to build up and burn something out, or something having electrical conductivity dropping across the two or more differing currents/polarities and connecting them together, with the same result.

I would suggest that, if your friend’s (mother)board shorted and burned out, then it was due to either a loose screw or wire/piece of solder crossing two supply tracks, or simply bad (mother)board manufacture: In which case he should return it to the manufacturer for a refund or a new board.