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OCZ = Fire hazard.

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pcgamer4life

Member
Joined
Dec 30, 2004
My friend's mom cut him a $1500 for christmas to build a computer. I helped him pick out the parts, whatever. I helped him get everything together one day afterschool... the main concern is his PSU.. it's an Ocz something or other (I think mod/powerstream, I'm not really sure what he ordered.)
So we get everything connected, go to boot her up... we plug in the wall outlet (psu is off)... blue sparks from the outlet, breaker flips. yay.


We move to a different outlet, try again, the fat prong on the power cord MELTS. Maybe .5cm of it is charred, melted, and deformed. Again, blue sparks. Lights flicker in the house. We get a new power cable, same effect (this time, no melting of the prong.)

So apparently, a defective PSU. Hopefully nothing in his system got raped.
 
Sounds like a dead short in or behind the PSU's power socket. It is likely the whole system escaped unharmed, but the PSU will need to be RMA'd for sure.
 
<sigh> I do know this. It wasn't a PowerStream... surge protector or not. OCZ's protection circuitry is known to be the best you can buy.

I would BEG the mods to change the title of this thread!

An OCZ PowerStream is one of THE best OC'ing power units that money can buy. I know this becasue I own one, as well as hundreds of others here who own them and have clocked to levels that exceed 6GHz now...yes 6GHz, and I just saw one with a CPU-Z verified clock of 5.991.01 MHz (5.991GHz).

An OCZ is definitely NOT a fire hazzard. A Deer, a Codegen, a PowMax is a fire hazzard, but definitely not a OCZ.

It looks like the houses wiring was the fire hazzard.
 
it's called a lemon, every manufacturer makes them

not saying his unit was bad or OCZ is bad at all but there is no product with a 0% failure rate

if by chance it was his house wiring, the surge protector may have saved the PSU and any component that may have been damaged, surge protectors do more than protect against surges at least quality ones
 
3DFlyer said:
<sigh> I do know this. It wasn't a PowerStream... surge protector or not. OCZ's protection circuitry is known to be the best you can buy.

I would BEG the mods to change the title of this thread!

An OCZ PowerStream is one of THE best OC'ing power units that money can buy. I know this becasue I own one, as well as hundreds of others here who own them and have clocked to levels that exceed 6GHz now...yes 6GHz, and I just saw one with a CPU-Z verified clock of 5.991.01 MHz (5.991GHz).

An OCZ is definitely NOT a fire hazzard. A Deer, a Codegen, a PowMax is a fire hazzard, but definitely not a OCZ.

It looks like the houses wiring was the fire hazzard.


LoL, I would have to say that ur not 100% right with that.
I had an OCZ 520W ps n it short-circuited. Leaving my house completely
powerless. My house has better SCP than the ocz i had.

SCP on my ocz psu failed, now its dead.
 
GáTê©rÀ$Hë® said:
LoL, I would have to say that ur not 100% right with that.
I had an OCZ 520W ps n it short-circuited. Leaving my house completely
powerless. My house has better SCP than the ocz i had.

SCP on my ocz psu failed, now its dead.

Yet again, it was one fualty one, of millions of good ones.
 
Well, you probably should have stopped the moment you saw the blue sparks. Sparks in electronics equipment is never good. Also, OCZ has good customer service, go ahead and get an RMA from them, the one you get back from them will work fine.
 
ckj said:
Well, you probably should have stopped the moment you saw the blue sparks. Sparks in electronics equipment is never good. Also, OCZ has good customer service, go ahead and get an RMA from them, the one you get back from them will work fine.
Yes agreed, and they may even get you a step up since it endangered the rest of your compenents. Also, it's pretty easy to tell if it is the Powerstream or Modstream...I mean all you have to do is check and see if its modular or not.
 
EDITED
^ thats what i was thinking, and that is one hell of a title to choose
 
Last edited:
Feydd said:
It wasn't set to 220V was it?

It'd be more likely to spark, surely, if he was in a 230V country and he had the psu set to 110V...?

I think that would be 10 times more likely than an internal fault with the psu. House wiring would be more likely too.

But there's always the chance an odd banana will come out straight.
 
I was, by no means, bashing OCZ as a company... probably a poor choice of a title on my part. I was only picking a title for my experience, not to generalize or stereotype the rest of the units. I was well aware that it was a faulty unit, sorry for the misconception.

Anyways, yeah, we checked to make sure it was set to 115. It wasnt modular, but it was a $139 psu, so I'm not debating the quality of the company. I was simply sharing my experiences. Went ahead and RMA'd through newegg, new PSU is supposed to arrive today.

And no, it wasn't a bad cord, as the first one melted, we tried a second, which did the same thing.
 
bobmanfoo said:
^ thats what i was thinking, and that is one hell of a title to choose, same thing as me saying: YOU = SUCK cause you can't put together a PC properly, and if you thought it was a fire hazard why the hell did you plug it in a couple more times? :eh?:

We are talking about a piece of hardware here, not a human being, so it wouldn't be the same as saying "You = Suck cause you can't put a pc together properly" You basically flamed him, it was uncalled for.
Also just because he may have less experience with electronics and what one should or shouldnt do when there are sparks, does not mean he put the pc together incorrectly.
This paticular psu was doa, it happens to em all, none are perfect. Do not plug a psu in more than once if sparks are emitted from it. Each time you do, it increases the chance that other hardware gets fried.
 
I would like to say that I have seen an example of a completely bogus cpu-z "verified" overclock. A cpu multiplier with a decimal is a big giveaway. Either it has been forged or it is a bug.
 
sunrunner20 said:
I would like to say that I have seen an example of a completely bogus cpu-z "verified" overclock. A cpu multiplier with a decimal is a big giveaway. Either it has been forged or it is a bug.
lol, wrong thread?
 
sorry if i came off a little harsh, my apoligies... i've had a bad case of diarrhea today... i knew i should have thown away soup that was sitting on the stove for 2 days :(

anyhow back on topic, 140$ for a modstream is a bit steep(we talking USD?), when you RMA you should see if you can get the powerstream, IRC the powerstreams uses higher quality components
 
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