Enermax Liberty 620...Blew up...

Yup, Enermax 620 roughly one year old, bit the big one. Was browsing the web when a bright flash, with a pop/crack sound came from the back of the psu. Scared the mess outta me. Psu was being used on the system in my sig.

I have a ups and the most it ever showed being pulled from the wall was 470watts, well within limits of the psu. Took her apart to see what the deal was and noticed a torched mosfet, a cap, and a blown fuse. I think the problem was the mosfet, I noticed a electrical type smell yesterday, but thought it was coming from my laser printer since it puts out a similar smell when heating up. Then this morning I play Ep2 for a couple hours and all seems well. Later I'm just browsing when the shebang happens.

Me and psu's just don't seem to get along, this is the third one to die on me in about as many years. One cheap Aspire psu, knew it would go anyway. So I buy better quality, OCZ Powerstream. It dies while doing a torture test with a opty 165. So moved up to the Liberty 620 which from reviews was supposed to be a very good psu. oh well...

Anyway I have replaced it with the Antec Quattro Power 850. Hopefully this one will last me a while...


Ply

Dang, that's weird. I've had my 500w Liberty drawing 500w from the outlet np. I did hear that the 620's were far more problematic than the 500's.

Regardless, I'm glad you're OK and I hope your rig is ok as well. Just an FYI, you weren't pushing the PSU at all with your rig in sig in case you were wondering.

just had a EM liberty 620 die myself one month of use. had a 500w die in a customers machine after 3 months a 400W after 6 months.

I purchased my first EM PS about the time they released the NF2 chipset. it ran for 3 years before i sold it on the forums.

I just started buying EM libertys the past 8 months, there track record sofar is terriable this time around.

Yeah was wondering in the back of my mind if the quad core was too much for it, but as I said my ups showed 470 max being pulled from the wall. And I about had a heart attack when I put the new psu in and it did not boot up. But a reset and all was well.

And thanks for the kind words NickS...


Ply

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bypolar

just had a EM liberty 620 die myself one month of use. had a 500w die in a customers machine after 3 months a 400W after 6 months.

I purchased my first EM PS about the time they released the NF2 chipset. it ran for 3 years before i sold it on the forums.

I just started buying EM libertys the past 8 months, there track record sofar is terriable this time around.

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Ouch! That's a lot of Enermax psu's killing over. Wonder if they had a bad spell of quality control or something...


Ply

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Plywood99

Ouch! That's a lot of Enermax psu's killing over. Wonder if they had a bad spell of quality control or something...


Ply

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Possibly. Me and afireinside have been runnin 500 Liberty's for ages.

Liberties ain't what they used to be. When they were first released they were OK but Enermax got cheap on us.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4077

Now this problem here isn't cap related apparently but I've heard of many of these things blowing up. I'm staying well away from them personally.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SparkyJJO

Liberties ain't what they used to be. When they were first released they were OK but Enermax got cheap on us.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4077

Now this problem here isn't cap related apparently but I've heard of many of these things blowing up. I'm staying well away from them personally.

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Nice forum Sparky, I tried to register there but they don't allow free email.:confused:

Anyway, here are some pics of the inside and the damaged areas if you want to upload them to that site no problem. After reading that thread I will not purchase another Enermax psu...

Pics one and two show the damaged fet, three shows an overall pic, including the crappy CTC caps Enermax used.

http://aycu27.webshots.com/image/325...6605084_rs.jpg


http://aycu02.webshots.com/image/305...7109804_rs.jpg


http://aycu12.webshots.com/image/305...0216269_rs.jpg


Ply

I had one 620w Liberty fail..was bought when they first came out...PFC module blew, tripping house breaker, had a minor flame-out(might have been dust that cuased the flamage).

Replacement is running Q6600 @ 3ghz, X1900XTX, X1800XL, tv tuner, 6 250GB HDD's, and X-FI in Stacker 830 fully equppied with fans. Been going for quite some itme too, cannot remember exactly how long tho.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cadaveca

I had one 620w Liberty fail..was bought when they first came out...PFC module blew, tripping house breaker, had a minor flame-out(might have been dust that cuased the flamage).

Replacement is running Q6600 @ 3ghz, X1900XTX, X1800XL, tv tuner, 6 250GB HDD's, and X-FI in Stacker 830 fully equppied with fans. Been going for quite some itme too, cannot remember exactly how long tho.

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Yeah, they just seem to be hit or miss. Must be some kind of design flaw or something that only shows up under certain circumstances. Just thinking out loud mind you, have no real clue as to why some work great and others just go BOOM...


Ply

Interesting. That looks like one of the rectifiers used for PFC in the unit. Bad AC could've killed this unit.

Or is the burn actually coming from the PCB just below the rectifier in the photo?

Don't know if AC is bad or not. According to my ups it runs around 116-120 constant. Have not recorded a single brown out yet.

Hmm, is the rectifier the little platter shaped thing to the right???


Ply

Are you going to send it back to Enermax?

Platter thing to the right? Not sure what that means, but the rectifier is the black square with the two notches in the side and three legs going through the PCB. From the angle of the camera, it looks like the burn is at the base of this rectifier by one of the three legs. Then again, it could be coming from the PCB just under where the rectifier is mounted. Can't really tell from your photos. Maybe you can clarify exactly where that burn is coming from.

I can't think of what would be on the PCB at the base of that rectifier other than a few ceramic caps that wouldn't burn nearly that much.

EDIT: I think I know what you mean by "platter thing." In the second photo, that brown round thing is a ceramic cap. It could be what blew. Still hard to explain.

Personally i think the modular connector design is allowing for dust build-up and the rect. is shorting out. Old liberty's has a lanyard, cord, 4 screws, and cables in box, along with a case badge.

New ones come with little rubber covers for the unused modular connectors.

My PSU ended with permanent short..needed to unplug from wall in order to reset breaker properly. In my case, bad power is possible, but not very likely...nothing else has ever died in that socket, nor has the breaker ever tripped again...only other thing plugged in there is DSL modem, and they are finicky on power provided...


Plywood's rectifier blew, it looks like to me...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cadaveca

Personally i think the modular connector design is allowing for dust build-up and the rect. is shorting out. Old liberty's has a lanyard, cord, 4 screws, and cables in box, along with a case badge.

New ones come with little rubber covers for the unused modular connectors.

My PSU ended with permanent short..needed to unplug from wall in order to reset breaker properly. In my case, bad power is possible, but not very likely...nothing else has ever died in that socket, nor has the breaker ever tripped again...only other thing plugged in there is DSL modem, and they are finicky on power provided...


Plywood's rectifier blew, it looks like to me...

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Yup, that is what happened. I thought it was a mosfet or something. One leg is completely burnt through. And I think mine ended in permanent short also, until the fuse vaporized that is. Fuse is just white powder now...


Ply

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Plywood99

Nice forum Sparky, I tried to register there but they don't allow free email.:confused:

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Yeah they had boatloads of spam come through. Use your email address your ISP gave you and you should be able to register then. I used my university address myself.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jonnyGURU

Platter thing to the right? Not sure what that means, but the rectifier is the black square with the two notches in the side and three legs going through the PCB. From the angle of the camera, it looks like the burn is at the base of this rectifier by one of the three legs. Then again, it could be coming from the PCB just under where the rectifier is mounted. Can't really tell from your photos. Maybe you can clarify exactly where that burn is coming from.

I can't think of what would be on the PCB at the base of that rectifier other than a few ceramic caps that wouldn't burn nearly that much.

EDIT: I think I know what you mean by "platter thing." In the second photo, that brown round thing is a ceramic cap. It could be what blew. Still hard to explain.

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Thanks for clarification Johnny...


Ply

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cadaveca

...dust build-up and the rect. is shorting out.

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Conductive metallic dust?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jonnyGURU

Interesting. That looks like one of the rectifiers used for PFC in the unit.

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Looks like a primary switching transistor to me. While it could be a result of bad or inadequate filtering on the primary PFC circuit, my first instinct is bad capacitors - probably somewhere in the primary other than the main filter cap. It does happen to Enermax units, as a friend of mine found out, and I'm not especially fond of those CEC caps Enermax is so bent on using in the cheap models.

Could also be primary transformer saturation or overload/failure of the secondary, or one of the other causes of primary switcher failure too though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oklahoma Wolf

Looks like a primary switching transistor to me.

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I didn't think it was shaped right and I don't a Liberty here to take apart and find out. :p:

Depends - some units like those two Corsairs we reviewed use the same MOSFETs for both switchers and PFC transistors ;)

I'm just guessing myself though from the fact it's facing the primary transformer where the switchers usually are. Also, picture #2 makes me think the one next door went out too. In that pic, you can see a similar transistor on the other side of the sink.

Here's a new enermax liberty dxx 1000 $360 Steaming Pile of DUNG.
I think a blacksmith could have done a better job soldering with a hot horse shoe.
Attachment 65850
Attachment 65851

They better offer fast replacements or they might go by the wayside like
Li-Lian PS.

Man, Dengyong that solder job is horrible! Just confirms no more Enermax for me.

I hope the Antec Quattro 850 I bought is a good enough unit...


Ply

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dengyong

I think a blacksmith could have done a better job soldering with a hot horse shoe.

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I've seen worse ;)

lol I won't post up my DXX...it's far worse than any other Ihave seen so far...including components I haven't seen on other PSU's of the same model/make/whatever...soldered by hand on to the back of the pcb's....

Still use the Galaxy tho.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jonnyGURU

Conductive metallic dust?

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um....Jonny, dry hair would do it. Everyone sheds thousands daily...;)

http://www.rafischer.com/hairpg2.htm

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cadaveca

um....Jonny, dry hair would do it. Everyone sheds thousands daily...;)

http://www.rafischer.com/hairpg2.htm

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Cool. What are the odds? :D

Have there been wide-spread reports of failure? CTC are probably not stellar but I have not seen any blown up CTC's either. The occasional one does not count for obvious reasons. Solder gobs on the PCB are nothing new.

For example see here (page 2)-->
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1483/

A minor correction to the article and a few more pictures to put things in perspective): <Sorry for the shameless plug :D>
Unit is not built by CWT it is an HEC build. I had a torn up CWT beside it and made the mistake of reading off of the wrong PCB.

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&re...5b543a05bde627

Secondary side beefed up with UCC and a lone Matsushita/Panasonic FM:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&re...5b543a05bde627

Dead images.

Hmm..do these work?

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/197...ecap003te1.jpg
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/6...ecap001cg7.jpg
http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/1...ecap002po5.jpg

Yup, and nice pics to...


Ply

Sony DSC-H2 FTW (looks like this model is the sweet spot for price/performance, beating out the newer models according to dpreview). :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jonnyGURU

Cool. What are the odds? :D

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Odds are good enogh that it would xplain the few bad PSU's we've seen. There's nothing that is really common in the death of these Liberty units...some are like plywood's and mine...I probably have a far greater load than he does, and my psu died muc hfaster, so you'd think this was a BOM problem, and nothing but, however the inclusion of the dust covers in the box really highlight dust as a problematic cause for the Liberty line, most likely due to how the air flows in this PSU. you'll actually find a straight draft down between the rectifier heatsinks(smoke tested), and as it would only take a single hair to cause a short, it's more than possible, but as you allude to, very hard to confirm, or deny, as the hair would probably be vaporized when creating a short.

Anyway, by the burn marks, something is burning, for sure. Without a large number of units to analyze, any summary of events leading to the death of these PSU's cannot be wholely accurate...we need batch numbers, etc etc...


Anyway, something is killing these psu's, and quite a few of them too.

"Something is killing these psu's, and quite a few of them too".

It's lack of quality control aka greed.

I've been using my Liberty 500w for over 2 years now. Hopefully she's not on her last leg.

Last thing I want is for it to blow when I'm in a dead sleep. I don't think I'd ever recover from that type of trauma. :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The Legend

I've been using my Liberty 500w for over 2 years now. Hopefully she's not on her last leg.

Last thing I want is for it to blow when I'm in a dead sleep. I don't think I'd ever recover from that type of trauma. :p

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the worst part when a psu blows up is the time it takes to put in a new one to make sure the the one that blew up didnt take any other hw with it...
i've once had a crappy cheap psu blow up, never an enermax though, i think your liberty should be safe though as its mostly newer liberties that are crapping out

..umm soo should i sell mine? :shrug:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Corsa

..umm soo should i sell mine? :shrug:

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How old is it? I wouldn't. Selling your PSU just because of an isolated incident is dumb. It's a good PSU, I guess some are duds

I bought it 2nd hand, it was 18 mths old, was running a OC e6600, 2x1900xt.....so far soo good :rolleyes:

Should definitely be OK.

Yeah, mine blew...rest of the pc is still running 24/7 with different PSU, and I bet PLywood's got the same story as I do...weird death, but PSU the only fatality.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cadaveca

Yeah, mine blew...rest of the pc is still running 24/7 with different PSU, and I bet PLywood's got the same story as I do...weird death, but PSU the only fatality.

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Yup, only the psu died. All else is fine...


Ply

what else is on your outlet circuit? could some motor in your house like a fridge or heater have kicked on and dropped the line voltage a little? if the voltage drops going into the psu the psu will pull more amps, and a lot of electronics are current sensitive more then they are voltage sensitive.