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There's yellow goop in my power supply.

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Ragnarok

Registered
Joined
Oct 16, 2002
Location
UW, Seattle
My computer died a while back when my watercooling system exploded, and out of curiosity (and to score a perfecty good 80mm fan) I opened it up. Upon doing so, I found yellow goop covering my capacitors and a few of my inductors (which I believe are the torus thingies). Whoa.

I don't think the capacitors blew, because they don't bulge out or anything... they look perfectly healthy. However, the material in my inductors is also yellow.

Of course, I'm thinking my inductors melted. Does this happen?

Thanks.
 
the same thing happened to one of my friends computers. He had a p4 2.4 and and a bunch of power hungry components on a 250 watt cheap ps and it blew out one day. When i took the ps out of the case, i noticed yellow stuff splattered on the inside. I guessed that it was the plastic covering on transformers in there, but im not sure. I know it wasnt in there before the ps blew out.
 
Aha. Thanks. Funny you should mention, because my PS was a 250 watt, and as generic as they come, to boot. Mine was a Bestec... do you know, offhand, what brand your friend's P4 PS was?
 
it'll be the non cunductin glayer around the inductors and/or possibly the dielectric from inside the capaitors.

P.S. if oyu want scary try switching on your box hearing a bang seeing a god awful flash followed by a capacitor being spat out of the cooling fan, my heart stopped:eek:
 
nope, i dont know the brand... i had never heard of it before, and none of the labels were in english. He has a pretty power hungry system too. it was a p4 2.4. 512 ddr266, gf4ti4600, audigy platinum, 2x 80gb wd 8mb, floppy, zip, cdrw, dvdrom, firewire card, a few 80mm fans, tv tuner, and a few others. it was a nice system... to bad the board was fried. at least it gave him an excuse to stop starving that poor p4 and get it some memory that could provide more than 1/2 its fsb capacity.
 
That yellow stuff could very well be hot glue. Some companies use it to help hold their bits in place. Of course the last PSU I saw it in was out of an 8086......
 
If it's hard, or at least mostly firm, then it's just to hold the components in place when they go through the wave soldering machine during production. Tall caps & other components have a tendancy to tip over during this process.

If it's more liquid like, then it's electronics innards ;)
 
LMAO regarding the explodeing caps. I used to work at an electronics store and we got bored out by the dumpsters we would take some good size caps and put them in a peanut butter jelly sandwich. When the rats would come for the sandwiched we had connected an extension chord to the caps and would than plug it into the wall. BANGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
 
I am running the following on a stock Dell 250w(the Britney Spears of PSUs):
P4 2.4GHz
640MB DDR SDRAM
GeForce 4 MX 420
2x 7200RPM 60GB Western Digital HDs
PCTV Pro
48x24x48x CD-RW
50x CD-ROM
System is stable even with both CD drives going, distributed.net running(I crack RC5-72 for OCAU), and HDTV open(nothing overclocked).
Voltages(measured with a radioshack DMM):
12v: 12.06
5v: 4.99
3.3v: 3.30
BTW, I reverse engineered an old dell supply from a p133.
That dell supply used a LITEON power transformer(at first, I thought they only made CD-ROM drives).
There is only one switching transistor(well, only one big primary transistor, as there is a smaller transistor in the 5VFP supply, and several big transistors on the secondary side), but it is a high-power IGBT (20A, 900v) in a TO-3 case.
The primary caps are 680uF each, for a total of 1360uF(most PC power supplies have only 2 470uF, or 940uF total)!
 
FastFSB that system sounds EXACTLY liek mine, cept i have a 400W Sparkle :D and a 9700pro. well, it is power hungry i'll say. and about flying caps...out the back of the comp...I noticed a PSU randomly start smoking once, my dad said it was defective and bright it from his office for me to loko at...my room got filled with smoke from that one and it was a cap blowing up...actualy about 3.
 
Speakign of blown caps, check my sig for 2 Abit boards running 100% stable even with 90% of all mobo caps blown :D
 
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