Power Light Glow Amber

[jai614]

I was using my PC and it shut off, it was only operating for like 10 minutes or less. When i looked at the power light it was glowing a kind of amberish color.
I googled around and i saw it was a power supply problem but i just replaced a broken one with double the wattage like 4 months ago.
Is there any other reason for this?
I don't have many devices, only a dvd burner, cd-rom drive, mouse & keyborad and that's it.
I removed a floppy drive and 56k modem last night, could this have caused this?

[chrisbliss18]

Usually a power light turning amber on any device indicates that it is in a stanby-mode (i.e. neither off or in operating-mode). Make sure that your system is actually off and not just in standby.

[jai614]

i should have updated this,
but the problem was solved after i removed the m-b battery and held down the power button for a few seconds, i guess after removing those devices some power was left back or something.
but it wasn't in standby mode

[nizzy1115]

i should have updated this,
but the problem was solved after i removed the m-b battery and held down the power button for a few seconds, i guess after removing those devices some power was left back or something.
but it wasn't in standby mode

usually it is a power supply issue. Double the wattage doesnt necessarily mean double the quality. What brand / model is it? Do you have a spare you can use to test with?

[jai614]

i know the issue is the power supply, they always die on me, i don't know why :cry:
but why? lets exclude brand as a factor, and power outages and surge protection. what else could cause a 450+W power supply to go dead, like say every 6 months?

for reference devices are:
2 hard-drives
2 cd/dvd rom burning drives
4 ram modules
and 1 fan
n-vidia g-card
1 optical mouse
and a USB connected printer
and i do no overclocking

and the one i'm currently using was ordered from Dell
and i've tested with a 250W and it fried it in under 15 minutes

[nizzy1115]

Well first, just because it is a high wattage doesn't mean its a good quality one or efficient one. (An efficient 300 watt one will probably give as much pure current as a 450 watt junk one.) My computer case came with a 450 watt one and i threw it away because i new the components inside were crap.

However, what it seams to me is that maybe heat is an issue in your case. You only have one fan you said, so your computer is probably realing on your power supply's fan to draw the extra heat out of your computer case. Power supplies dont like heat (they become less efficient, and capacitors tend to burst). If it is possible, i would look to adding additional case fans to help exhaust the hot air from your computer.

[jai614]

by that one fan i meant the case fan, the power supply has it own fan, the g-card has a built in fan and the machine case came built with ready hard-drive fans.
but i'll still consider mounting a fan untop the processors heat-sink :)

[daniwebuser7]

i have a Gateway 700xl Jan2002 that I replaced the replacement Antec Smart Power 2 500w ($35 Staples sale) very loud high pitch noise PSU w/ a AeroCool ZeroDBa 620W unit ($95 CompUsa going out of business sale), and the system would only show a yellow power light on the front button (motherboard showed 5V green light) and no fans or harddrive would start...like Standby. Thanks to this thread and another, I tried the bios battery removal trick and the system came back to life. Darn, I was going to tell my wife that I needed a new Xeon Quad system with a 30" monitor.

[daniwebuser7]

I noted that someone found some power supply statistics in a forum at Tom's hardware that even the best power supplies seem to have a failure rate of 1/100 and Antec had up to a 9% failure rate...that is terrible. My HP a430n power supply also died, an Astec? 250W unit that I replaced with a 500W Coolermaster which has too noisy of a fan compared to the new Aerocool zerodba unit.