Stopped trusting brand new PSUs out of the box after the Seasonic fiasco

Used to just plug in any new power supply and go. Thought they were all tested before shipping. Then I built a rig for my buddy last year. Seasonic Focus Plus Gold 750 watt. Boot loop nightmare for three days straight. Tried everything else first. RAM reseating, GPU swap, breadboarding on a cardboard box. Finally swapped in my old EVGA unit from 2018. Fired right up. Seasonic had a bad batch of capacitors that quarter. Now I always run a paperclip test on a new PSU before I even mount it. Has anyone else had a brand new component fail right out of the box on a fresh build?

2 comments

2 Comments

west.alice1d ago

Yeah the paperclip test is good but it only checks if the PSU turns on. It won't tell you if the voltages are stable or if it's going to dump ripple all over your components. You really need a multimeter or a cheap PSU tester to see the actual rails. That Seasonic thing was rough though, I remember a lot of people had that exact same boot loop issue. It was mostly the early 2020 production batches that had bad caps from what I read later. EVGA units from that era were solid, I still have an old 650 G3 running in a backup machine.

cole_bailey851d ago

I learned the hard way that paperclip tests are just the PSU saying 'I'm alive, probably'...

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