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On Wed, 28 Sep 2011, Adrian Midgley wrote:
A power supply from a PC should start up when the mains is plugged into it?
The power supple starts up, but it won't neccessarily power up the PC, (or it's own fan) other than supply 5V standby to it. Some motherboards have an LED connected to this. The motherboard will power up on several different events - one is the power switch, another might be a BIOS setting to auto power up and another might be on a signal over Ethernet (wake on LAN). Various RTC events can wake a PC up too when configured correctly.
It draws a little power from the mains - at least there is a spark noise when the lead is shoved in live, but its fan doesn't start up.
That's what I'd expect - unless the BIOS is set to auto-power-on the motherboard.
There is no voltage on the green lead that I gather is supposed to be +5v and driven low to switch it on Plugs from it are a block of 8 and a block of 24 - ATX isn't it.
So basically your PC is not working?You need to work out if it's the PSU that's blown or the motherboard. To do this you need another PC - power the motherboard off the PSU in the other PC, or (slightly more "dodgy") power the motherboard in the 2nd PC off your "suspect" PSU. (It's more dodgy in that it might have been the PSU that's blown up the motherboard - unlikely, but a finite possibility)
My room is so quiet at the moment though that I may be in the market for a new machine that has less howling fans. Old one is a Dell Poweredge 1850 and I use grahics cards in PCI-Express slots.
What does the panel like for hardware these days?
I build my own and buy most stuff from http://www.aria.co.uk ... Last full-spec PC I built cost me about £350 inc VAT. in components and for that I got a mini-tower case, Core2-Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB SSD and a 22" widescreeen monitor, although I'm going to ugprade the PSU to a quieter one shortly (another 20 quid ish)
However you might want something that's not got on-board graphics if you're into gaming. For general office type stuff, I've found on-board graphics chips to be more than adequate. (for a £35 motherboard) That one above has an intel i950 chip on it and runs the monitor at 1920x1440 without any issues. (Runs Debian out of the box). If you want the absolute best Gb performance then try to get intel Gb Ethernet interface, but realtek are OK, but you'll struggle to stream more than about 830Mb/sec in a single stream over them.
Gordon
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