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A 20 year guy at the shop said never trust a customer's power supply, and I laughed at him
About 6 months ago I was doing a tune up on a guy's custom build here in Akron and it kept random rebooting under load. I had already swapped the RAM and reseated the GPU twice, so I was about to order a new board. The old timer who trained me back in the day, Dale, always said never trust a customer's power supply, test it first, no matter what they tell you. I rolled my eyes at that advice for years because I figured a PSU either works or it does not. Well, I finally put a tester on it and the 12 volt rail was sagging down to 11.2 under any real load, which was enough to trip the reboots. Turned out the guy had bought a 550 watt unit for like $35 off a marketplace listing and swore up and down it was fine. Swapped in a decent 650 and it ran clean for a week straight, no reboots. So yeah, Dale was right and I ate crow on that one. Any of you still skip the PSU test when a machine acts haunted, or did you learn the hard way like me?
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the_mason1mo ago
Learned that lesson the hard way too, except I spent two weeks chasing a "bad motherboard" that was really just a dying PSU the whole time. Guessing and swapping parts feels productive but it just burns time and customer money while the real problem sits there laughing at you. Test the power supply first, every single time, because that cheap unit someone swore was fine is usually the one lying.
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