Power Supply help :-/
 

Bought a Raidmax 868 w/a PS from newegg when it was on sale. Got it yesterday and was curious about the power supply since my buddy bought a PS from a mom 'n' pop store that drew sparks and blew out his entire system when he plugged it in. So I took it out of the box and plugged in the power supply to the wall socket. My newbieness to pc building makes me believe that it would at least turn the PS units fan on.

My friend told me that it probably won't turn on until I connect the motherboard to it. He thinks that the motherboard will 'tell' it to turn on.

So my question is: Is the power supply fan supposed to turn on when you plug it in?

your friend is correct, the motherboard does tell it to turn on by creating a circuit

if you jump the green wire to one of the black wires in the atx plug (the one that connects to the mobo) and then just power it on at the wall it fools it into thinking its connected to mobo and powered on, then you can test if it works at all ;)

Beeyootiful. Thanks for the info! I thought I would have to rma that sucker.

it alwasy good to give it a test. i felt lazy once and didn't do the test when i built my old computer, my power supply fried and had it replaced. luckily nothing happened to my other parts tho

Its hard for a PS to burn your MOBO. I have had 3 PS burn due to dust but they never ruined anything else.

i had purchassed a psu from a traveling computer sales show when i first built my pc... the box told me it was 450watts... oh how they lied. make sure your unit has how many watts written on it. after running a 500 watt unit, i think the previous wasnt more then 350...

500 watt antec and a lite on dvd burner for 200 even USD :-D
and that could make a lot of sence, im not terribly familiar with power supplys 'how they work' plug it in, converts votage... voila! its magic :wink:

I would've thought enermax would be one of the best. But Antec ones are good and pretty cheap.

Well, its working nice and fine now. Thanks to all who've clarified the mystery. Its my first pc build, so I was very concerned about blowing all these parts on one component. Took it to the pcpitstop website and did a full test. The score was 1645. I know that jabbas computer has some insane specs on it...I wonder what his would score. Probably twice as mine since I aimed this just for casual gaming and editing home videos on dvd.

Here's wut i'm running:
athlon64 3000+
2x512 mushkin ddr400
radeon 9600 w/256mb
160gb samsung hd
12x DL dvd from optorite

:mrgreen: :mrgreen: I'm so happy to have a fast pc again. no more cyrixII 250mhz!

Why don't you post this as a new topic, we can all compare our PC's then!!

Work PC: 1304

Mmk, maybe I will.

My scores are not that great...as its power on the gaming side of things is split across four screens.

I really wanted it for encoding videos...and that it does rather well...a sixty minute video taking about 20-25 mintues to encode into divx 5.1.1

Holly hell thats fast!!