ziv-ravitz

I’d stopped repairing ATX power several years back as a result of new one cost very cheap. It’s not worth to repair it since the spare parts sometimes were much more costly than finding a new power supply. Looking for ATX power spare parts was not easy as most of them you can’t even find them on the internet. Not just that, many complicated and different created by power manufacturers had eaten up our precious troubleshooting time too as a result of we want time and energy to know the way each one of these different designed power work.

Some of the power designs were utilising the PWM IC (UC3842) and power FET, some utilize the double transistors while some use merely a single power IC in the principal side. Because of the manufacturers wants the style to be changed to compact size, many secondary or even primary power circuit were build in to a modular board (smaller board). This made troubleshooting even harder because many times the meter’s probe can’t reach to the testing point.

The real reasons why I’d stopped repairing ATX power was the profit margin. In the event that you charge to high the customers rather purchase a new unit with one year warranty given. In the event that you charge too low, you might end up in the losing side because of the components replaced, electricity and etc. In the event that you charge reasonable, the profit margin gained can’t even cover your time spent on troubleshooting it. I’m here to not discourage you to avoid repairing ATX power, however if you have enough time, have contacts getting cheap power components, accessible many power schematic diagrams and etc then you can go ahead to fix it.

Okay back again to the content, among my customers had asked me to fix his ATX power supply. I told him to obtain a new one (since it was very cheap) but he said he couldn’t find the one that suits his customer’s CPU. He wanted a power supply that is either same size or smaller then the original one with same or higher specification but all he could find was a typical size power!

As a favors to my customer, I would do my best to greatly help him to fix the ATX power supply. When the power supply was activate, measurements were taken. P2001 power station  The outcome were over voltage. The 12 volts line shot up to 13 + volt and the 5 volts line became 5.6 volts. Following the casing was removed, I found the within was very dirty and I used a hoover and a brush to clean off the dirt. Then I saw four filter electrolytic capacitors had bulged at the top casing.

Everbody knows, we as electronic repairers can’t just see things at just one side; we have to see another sides too. What After all was, try to see if you will find any suspicious components that contributed to the failure of the power supply such as broken components, dry joints, loose connection, decay glue and etc before start checking the suspected area.

What I saw was at the principal side there have been some components covered with decayed glue as observed in the picture. I have to carefully take it off by scrapping off the layers of the decayed glue while preserving the outer layers of the components. Once it was done, I clean it with the Thinner solution. Decayed glue might cause serious or intermittent problem in electronic equipment because it could be conductive.

In the event that you repair any ATX power, be sure you check the fan too because some power failure was due to heat the effect of a faulty fan. The objective of the fan would be to suck out all heat generated by the components inside the power supply. For the fan to run smooth, you can service it with a Philips oil base spray as shown in the photo.

Once the four electrolytic capacitors were replaced and the decayed glue removed, I then have to plug it in to a junk motherboard along with a hard disk drive to check the performance of the ATX power and measure most of its output voltages. It appears as though the output voltages were back again to normal. Once everything is okay I then test drive it in a working CPU to check on for the display.

The reason why I test drive it with a junk motherboard first as a means to not cause my good motherboard to lose their freshness just in case if the output voltages continues to be very high. Better safe than regret later. Incidentally you can’t test a power supply without load otherwise it might switched on for a while and then shut down. If you may not have a junk motherboard you can always at the least connect a hard disk drive and a line jumper to its connector to turn on the ATX power supply.