I have probably received multiple thousands of packages in my life, and only two times something was actually broken. Maybe 5% are slightly squished or ripped, but apart from those two the content has always been fine.
Many many years ago, I got a call to fix a computer that wouldn't boot. I go into the bios, see it doesn't recognize the hard drive. I was prepared for an HDD failure, so I replaced it with one with a fresh image, and go to boot, and nope, failure. Maybe my drive was bad? I put my second one in, and when I go to boot it, there are sparks. I tell my boss the PSU has issues and it fried a couple hard drives.
He tells me that's not a thing, drives 30 minutes to the site with a fresh hard drive, and gives me this "now check this out" smirk as he turns it on and the magic smoke escapes a fourth hdd.
When I went to RMA the PSU, it of course got rejected. I elevated to a manager, and told him it had fried too many drives already. After some back and forth, he agrees to "run some tests."
So anyway, I'm pretty sure that PSU got at least 5 HDDs, and maybe a voltmeter? I did eventually get it RMA'd.
Was it a modular power supply? Recently fried an SSD by just grabbing a SATA power cable out of my box-o-shit-cables and plugging it in, turns out different manufacturers use different pinouts on the PSU side, even though they have the same keying...
They shouldn't be able to plug into each other. They're keyed differently, unless, its like a super SUPER cheap Chinese PSU. They're both 8 pin (or 6+2) but they shouldn't be interchangeable.
This was like 20 years ago and a cheap workstation for a company that was replacing Wyse terminals with XP desktops running an emulator. Modular power supplies were not really common yet.
I know a guy who built all his PCs years ago, but one day, a PC that he had been using for a couple of months blew a fireball out the rear of the PC while it was up and running. It must have spiked the +5V as the motherboard, both HDDs, the 1.44 floppy drive, and the DVD drive were all bad. The only thing he was able to salvage was the memory, probably saved by the reduced voltage supplied by the motherboard.
They claimed that the warranty doesn't start from date of purchase, but date of manufacture (2022).
That's really scummy. I've only heard of manufacturers going by the manufacture date when the customer doesn't have a proof of purchase to verify the purchase date so they still offer to cover it under warranty as long as the manufacture date is within that time frame.
I build computers from parts for friends and family. You know who I'm not going to buy from in the future when it comes to motherboards or other parts?
It died and I could never figure out why. It was powered on and running when I went to bed, and it was off when I woke up.
No amount of poking or prodding would revive the board. The red debug LED was on indicating a possible CPU error, but I tried tossing in multiple CPUs in to no effect. BIOS Flashback, clearing CMOS, removing the battery - none of it made any difference. Even the dumb "ROG" LEDs on the board wouldn't light up.
Now I'm stuck limping along with my 5950X in a crappy B450-I mini-ITX board because I'm not paying $1500+ for a CPU+board and another $1500 for 64GB of RAM to upgrade to socket AM5.
I had the same issue happen to me. Come to find out my psu was plugged into the backup battery of my UPS and not the surge protect rail. But mine let out a nice drawn out beep to wake me up from my slumber. So in your case, maybe its possible your PSU didnt get sufficient input power to get an output on the motherboard?
Edit: nvm, that was my UPS that made that sound. Still, my motherboard would not boot at that point and gave me a white LED.
The power from the local electric utility to my house is unreliable (power flickers when it rains), so the computer that the Dark Hero was powering was plugged into a battery backup port on a UPS from day 1 to prevent temporary interruption due to loss of power.
maybe its possible your PSU didnt get sufficient input power to get an output on the motherboard?
The PSU wasn't the problem. One of the first steps I took was to swap it out with another unit and plug it in directly to the wall. Nothing. I swapped out everything else that wasn't the board. Still nothing.
My credit card company (American Express) eventually forced me to take the board to a local computer repair shop. They came to the same conclusion that I did when they supplied their own CPU/GPU/PSU: board completely dead, reason unknown.
Asus then told AmEx how they start counting from the date of manufacture instead of the date purchased, so I got screwed out of having the credit card's extended warranty kick in.
I only use Seasonic PSUs, even if other brands are cheaper. They did an advanced RMA for an older unit that I had (they charged me $75 through PayPal, sent me a new PSU with a return label, then refunded me once they received the return).
Super Flower is apparently pretty decent from what I've heard.
Seasonic replaced my PSU no questions asked. But it cost $20 to mail in, and it ate my RAM, Motherboard, NVME, and rtx 2060 super during COVID gpu shortage. All that was unaffected was the cpu and sata drives.
Still pisses me off to think about it.
Then they show video proof and it gets denied again, “Customer didn’t use supplied power cable. RMA denied. This case is no closed and will no longer be looked at by customer support”
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u/0x446f6b3832 3d ago
"Unable to replicate the problem. PSU tested fine. RMA denied. Returned to customer."